Olivia Shakespear & Yeats

ELT: VOLUME 34:4, 1991 ilate within its shifting antinomies the very scholarly methods we are currently attempting to use to describe it. Bruce Morris Palo Alto, California Olp/ia Shakespear & Yeats John Harwood. Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. xvii + 218 pp. $35.00 "IT WILL ALWAYS be a grief to me that I could not give the love that was her beauty's right, but she was too near my soul, too salutary and wholesome to my inmost being." So Yeats wrote of Olivia Shakespear in a draft of part of his autobiography, published in 1972 as Memoirs (88). Drawing extensively on unpublished materials, John Harwood has now provided a full account of the relationship, Yeats's first sexual liaison. As factual biography, the work is very valuable. Harwood comments that he has consulted "virtually every available fragment of documentary evidence ," and unless or until new matter comes to light, his study is in that sense definitive. In other ways, however, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence is seriously flawed. The first two chapters are devoted to background information on Olivia's family and her childhood (she was born on St. Patrick's Day in 1863) and on her marriage to Hope Shakespear on 8 December 1885. As we have known since the publication of Memoirs, this union was less than fully successful. They had but one child, Dorothy, born nine months and six days (not five, as Harwood has it) after the wedding. A canceled passage in Memoirs suggests that all sexual activity ceased after the wedding night, but an ambiguous reference in a 1929 letter may indicate otherwise. In any event, although the marriage was an unhappy one, the Shakespeare remained together. Olivia devoted herself to Dorothy, and by the early 1890s had also begun to write. The first of her six novels, Love on a Mortal Lease, was published in June 1894. Two months earlier, on 16 April 1894, she had first seen Yeats, at the inaugural dinner for The Yellow Book. They met soon thereafter, with the introductions provided by Lionel Johnson, a cousin of Olivia. Their relationship developed slowly: Olivia was away in France for a month, and Yeats spent October 1894 to May 1895 in Ireland. Upon his return, it was Olivia who initi484 Book Reviews ated the transformation of their friendship, telling Yeats of her "pagan life, in a way that made me believe that she had had many lovers." After a fortnight's deliberation, Yeats "asked her to leave home with me" {Memoirs, 85). One can only speculate on the course of literary history had this plan been implemented. However, there were numerous impediments to hand, not the least of which was Dorothy Shakespear. Yeats and Olivia recruited "sponsors" to discuss the situation: Olivia's was Valentine Fox, whose unhappiness in her own marriage offered a rather precise parallel; Yeats's may have been Florence Farr. Eventually the idea of elopement was abandoned. Yeats took rooms at Woburn Buildings by early March 1896, and it was there that they commenced their sexual liaison—or tried to. "I was impotent from nervous excitement," Yeats later recalled. Despite this unpropitious beginning, they went on to have "many days of happiness." Precisely how many is unknown: various trips kept them apart, and Harwood speculates (not entirely convincingly) that Yeats "fell out of love with her" during his summer 1896 trip to Ireland. In any case, Maud Gonne's visit to London in late February 1897 was at least the catalyst, if not the cause, of the collapse of the relationship, which ended shortly thereafter. Yeats noted that "it was the breaking between us for many years" {Memoirs, 88). In this instance, we may be certain that the "many" was no more than three, as on 20 May 1900, Yeats sent a note of condolence to Olivia on the death of her mother. Thereafter they remained friends until Olivia died on 3 October 1938, less than four months before Yeats. Whether their sexual relationship was ever resumed is open to question. George Yeats told Richard Ellmann that the affair had been renewed...