‘The Countess Cathleen’: Manuscript Materials by W.B. Yeats (review)

humanities 445 entries (for example, Russian Mennonite Margarethe Reimer's deep anger at her brother's flirtation with a Swiss Mennonite woman) would have improved the text. As well, more discussion of possible methodological approaches to these diaries, perhaps in a concluding chapter, would have been welcome. Though Loewen's use of historical sources to situate the various writers in their communities enriches the texts and does some of this methodological reflection via practice, he seems at times to let the broader sources drown out the voice of the diarist. For example, his repeated description of Abraham Reimer as a `lazy' failure, though not necessarily Loewen's own words, is not the dominant image evoked by Abraham's diary B that of a man who cares for his children, visits them regularly, and is aware of the social crises of his community. Though Reimer may not have become wealthy, repeatedly defining his life in the terms of economic success seems an injustice. This last point raises an important question about diaries as sources for scholars: how much and what kind of credibility do we give to life writings? Can a diarist contradict a portrait drawn by outside sources or merely complicate it? Loewen poses these questions by juxtaposing an intriguing variety of voices. He emerges with a text that offers voices both haunting and forgettable, which is perhaps as honest a portrait of any human community as one could expect. (PAMELA E. KLASSEN) W.B. Yeats. `The Countess Cathleen': Manuscript Materials. Edited by Michael J. Sidnell and Wayne K. Chapman Cornell University Press. lviii, 772. US $110.00 The Countess Cathleen, the drama of a woman selling her soul to buy food for her famine-struck people, has the longest and most colourful textual history of Yeats's twenty-six collected plays. Shortly after his first meeting in 1888 with Maud Gonne, who expressed her wish for a play she could perform in Dublin, the smitten poet began to transform the folk talèCountess Kathleen O'Shea' into a play that would be the object of restless revision for the next twenty-five years. The pattern of alteration was set when Gonne's refusal of Yeats's marriage proposal during composition dramatically effected the final acts of the first version, which he dedicated to her when it appeared in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892). Yeats's desire to stage the play led to revisions for its inclusion in Poems (1895), and again in Poems (1899), when he revised what had become The Countess Cathleen for the opening of the Irish Literary Theatre. Yeats was disappointed that Gonne refused to play Cathleen, vexed that the play was condemned for blasphemous and anti-nationalist content. His experience with that production led to further revisions for Poems (1901), and his later desire to make the play a part of the Abbey Theatre repertoire led to yet further revisions, though not without Gonne's 446 letters in canada 1999 remonstrance, for Poems (1912) and Poems (1913). In the wake of these published versions lie fifty-one manuscripts from fourteen archives in Ireland, England, and America. The manuscripts and the sequence of revisions have been carefully described in this massive, three-pound scholarly volume, the twelfth of the Cornell editions of Yeats's plays and poems. The edition is divided into the five major periods of composition and revision, and the great bulk of the volume is composed of photographs and transcriptions of the early manuscripts (1889B91); the corrected proof sheets of the 1892 first edition, together with an apparatus criticus for variants; photographs and transcriptions of fragments preliminary to the version in Poems (1895); the transcription of a revised copy of Poems (1899), used as the copy-text for Poems (1901), with apparatus criticus; photographs and transcriptions of the 1911 revisions; and, finally, transcriptions of a typescript of the complete stage version of 1911, together with an alternative ending for the reading version from Yeats's page proofs for A Selection from the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913), again with apparatus criticus. The result is a remarkable editorial feat of selection and arrangement to provide the scholar-critic with...