Sacrifice

Frank Kermode

  • The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893-1938 edited by Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares
    Hutchinson, 544 pp, £25.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 917410 00 9

Yeats avowed it more often and more impressively, but he was not alone in his belief that Maud Gonne’s beauty was of ‘a kind not natural in an age like this’. Shaw called her ‘outrageously beautiful’ and W.T. Stead, who could no more than Yeats isolate his admiration for her looks from an appraisal of her politics, described her as ‘one of the most beautiful women in the world’, going on to point out that ‘she is for the Irish Republic and total separation, peacefully if possible, but if necessary by the sword, that of France and Russia not excepted.’

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