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BOOK REVIEWS vision, lüce Christ's, beyond words. In this sense, WUde's Ufe completes his art—indeed is prolative of it. That, in the last analysis, is the meaning of his Christ." Phillip Johansen _____________ Cornell University Maud Gonne and Yeats The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares, eds. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. xvi + 544 pp. $35.00 THE CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT of A. Norman Jeff ares's distinguished career Ui Anglo-Irish literary studies, this landmark Norton edition presents for the first tune the entire sequence of over 350 letters Maud Gonne MacBride (1866-1953) wrote W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) m reply to the nearly continuous succession of missives the future Nobel laureate sent this independent and resourceful professional beauty, who deserted the Viceregal Court to play the romantic Irish revolutionary, yet who remained, with her reckless courage m the face of personal danger, Captain Thomas Gonne's rebelUous elder daughter. Although they are usually written hastily, m a brief, telegraphic style, with tantahzing references to difficult personal matters squeezed into postscripts , many of her letters become important documents Ui literary history because of the Ultimate details they reveal about the nearly ltfe-long obsessive relationship Ireland's Joan of Arc shared with Yeats. This frustrating "spiritual marriage" dragged the shy, naturally introspective poet through the bog of Irish nationaUst politics at the same tune as it inspired him to write patriotic plays for Gonne to act Ui lüce The Countess Cathleen (1892) and Cathleen Ni Hoolihan (1902), as weU as some of the most successful love poems of the fin de siècle. Among them are these beautiful lines he composed on 21 October 1891 in imitation of Pierre de Ronsard that were also among Gonne's personal favorites: "When you are old and grey and fuU of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face." 121 ELT 38: 1 1995 The famUiar (and historically accurate) version of their initial meeting was immortalized by Yeats himsetf in his first-draft autobiography where he recounted how the "troubling of my ltfe" began on Wednesday, 30 January 1889 when Maud Gonne drove up Ui a hansom cab at 3 Blenhein Road Ui the London suburb of Bedford Park. Much to his fanuiys dismay, her copious golden-red hau·, complexion like apple blossoms, and statuesque figure initiated "an overwhelming tumult" Ui his twenty-three year old IUe he compared to "a sound as of a Burmese gong" that nonetheless stUl contained, lüce her ever-present entourage of pet birds, "many pleasant secondary notes." The reverberations of her grand entrance that fatal day were still echoing m his imagination some forty years later on 13 June 1928 when he wrote begging Gonne's pardon for utilizing her image once again Ui "Among School ChUdren." However, it is important to keep Ui mind that m her own late ltfe memoirs, A Servant of the Queen (1938), Gonne would insist they had actually become acquainted several years earlier Ui Rathmines, outside Dublin, at the house of the old Fenian leader, John OTeary, who lent his ardent young disciples some books by the Young Ireland poet-revolutionaries of forty years before. This magnificently produced edition of their correspondence confirms what these conflicting memories suggest: even though she and Yeats achieved telepathic mystical unions Ui 1898 and 1908 (and probably engaged Ui a short-lived sexual aff air Ui 1909), Maud Gonne was neither frigid goddess nor scarlet woman, but rather a complex individual with her own unique point of view whose high-society background Ui Dublin Castle and British army circles contrasted sharply with Yeats's upbringing m the household of a gifted (though impecunious) Anglo-Irish portrait painter. And whUe Yeats continued to regard his relationship with Gonne as central to his entire emotional and artistic Ufe, Gonne...

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