Reconsidering Maud Gonne

I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began. I had heard from time to time … of a beautiful girl who had left the society of the Viceregal Court for Dublin nationalism. In after years I persuaded myself that I felt premonitory excitement at the first reading of her name. Presently she drove up to our house in Bedford Park with an introduction from John O'Leary [the Irish patriot] to my father. I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race.

—W. B. Yeats, Memoirs

YEATS WAS SO POWERFUL A MYTHMAKER that for decades his readers, myself included, have tended to see the fiery Irish nationalist Maud Gonne (1865–1953) through his eyes. From such early poems as "When You Are Old" to the late "A Bronze Head" and "Beautiful Lofty Things" (the latter contains, among its sacred memories, the image of "Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train, / Pallas Athena in that straight back and arrogant head"), Yeats immortalized his beloved, regularly declaring that even the violent acts she committed and instigated in her zeal for the Irish cause could be justified: "Why, what could she have done, being what she is? / Was there another Troy for her to burn?"

Yeats's biographers and Irish historians have treated Gonne more soberly, noting her single-mindedness and zealotry, her imperiousness, and her fanatic hatred of all things English, even as they have respected her work for poor Irish peasant women, for prison reform, and so on. The Gonne-Yeats Letters, for that matter, edited by Maud Gonne's grand-daughter Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (Norton, 1994), give a picture of an extraordinary woman, impulsive and difficult but intellectually gifted and as passionate about Irish literary life and theosophy as about politics.

Adrian Frazier's The Adulterous Muse debunks this image with a vengeance. For starters, he notes, this Irish Helen of Troy was not Irish at all but of bourgeois English stock. She was born in Surrey to a professional military officer Thomas Gonne, and his wife Edith Cook, the granddaughter of a very wealthy Norfolk manufacturer, who got his start in the hosiery trade. Edith died when Maud was only six; her father, now Colonel Gonne, held various posts until he took up a new post as commander of the British armed forces in Ireland and moved his family to Dublin in 1885. Maud and her sister Kathleen, fresh from finishing school, had a formal debut at the Viceregal Court and then spent much time in French watering places with their maternal great aunt who had settled in France. It was in 1887 at a spa in the Auvergne that the twenty-two-year-old Maud met an aide to General Georges Boulanger named Lucien de Millevoie, who was thirty-seven. Gonne and Millevoie soon became lovers. Marriage was never in question because he was already married, but their affair lasted, on again off again, for more than a decade. Then in 1898, Gonne learned that Millevoie had another mistress (he had already had many) and she finally broke with him. But in the interim they had two children—Georges (born 1890) and Iseult (born 1894). The existence of Georges was kept secret from Gonne's English relatives and her Irish friends; she went off to Dublin, London, and Paris, leaving the infant behind in France, where he died of meningitis in 1891. Guilty and momentarily distraught, Gonne, now a wealthy heiress, had a large mausoleum built for the dead infant and later claimed that it was beside his tomb that she and Millevoie conceived Iseult. A serious Occultist, Gonne evidently...