Biographer Brenda Maddox is interested in a very specific element of W.B. Yeats' life--his relationship with his wife--so she employs an unusual strategy for a biography. She begins Yeats' Ghosts more than halfway through Yeats' life--1917, when the poet is 51. She injects readers into her subject's life just as Yeats' relationship with "George," Georgie Hyde-Lees, is culminating in marriage. Yeats had been in love with another woman, Maud Gonne (reputedly "the most beautiful woman in Ireland"), but George developed what Maddox considers "one of the most ingenious strategies ever tried to take a husband's mind off another woman." Capitalizing on Yeats' fascination with the occult, she revealed herself to be a spirit medium, adept at "automatic writing." Yeats studied the garbled messages George channeled from these "Communicators" and forged the results into his extraordinarily powerful late poetry. As Maddox makes plain, George used her husband's belief in her spiritual talents to control him, "cutting Yeats off from his other occult associates and making him wholly dependent on her." With its strong focus on the interests and obsessions that informed Yeats' work, rather than the poetry itself, this subtly written biography offers a rare insight into the imaginative life of a great poet. --Adam Roberts, Amazon.co.uk


From Publishers Weekly
From his involvement in Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society in the 1880s to his experiments with automatic writing, s?ances and mystical literature, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) maintained a lifelong fascination with the occult (Auden would later describe this tendency as "the southern California side of Yeats"). Maddox, author of much-acclaimed biographies of Nora Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, does only a workmanlike job of linking moments in Yeats's verse to specific episodes from his private life (showing, for example, that the mechanical songbird of "Sailing to Byzantium" may have been inspired by a toy duck the poet bought at Harrod's for his son's third birthday). More important to Maddox are Yeats's sexual demons: she untangles various of Yeats's romantic relationshipsAwith Maud and Iseult Gonne; Lady Gregory; his wife, George; and a comely actress or twoAand mulls at length over the consequences for Yeats's later poetry of his vasectomy. But she's most informative when discussing the brilliant autodidact's attitudes toward his own creative process, making liberal use of George Mills Harper's 1992 edition of the notes Yeats made toward his mostly incomprehensible book of spiritualist philosophy, A Vision. While not as comprehensive or brilliant as such other Yeats biographies as Richard Ellman's or R.F. Foster's, Maddox's book nonetheless offers an intriguing glimpse into the dark, sometimes steamy, corners of the poet's singular mind. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In this New Age, "the academic world is less embarrassed by the paranormal than it used to be," notes Maddox (Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom). Here are two biographies that focus extensively on the psychic interests of renowned poet and playwright Yeats (1865-1939). Both authors acknowledge that spiritualism was popular around the turn of the century as a reaction against scientific developments, and both highlight Yeats's 1917 marriage to the psychic George Hyde-LeesAwhich Brown terms "one of the strangest acts of imaginative collaboration in all of literary history," with its emphasis on such practices as automatic writing. Brown (English, Trinity Coll., Dublin; Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays) traces Yeats's "Irish instinct for the spooky" to his childhood in a dysfunctional family. Maddox presents Yeats as an eccentric married to a woman shrewd enough to realize that the survival of her marriage depended on proactively supporting her husband's occult obsessions. (Maddox also looks frankly at the Nobel prize winner's relationships with the many women in his life, including patron of the arts, Lady Gregory; the great love of his life, the revolutionary Maud Gonne; and an assortment of mistresses.) While both books are extensively documented and well researched, Brown's is the more academic and analyzes Yeats's major works to a greater extent than Maddox's study. With its conversational style and flashes of wit, Maddox's work is more accessible to general audiences. Brown's book is recommended for academic libraries and Maddox's for both public and academic libraries.ADenise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CT Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.



“Yeats's Ghosts is a rich, engrossing, and rewarding work. Maddox weaves a racy story filled with humor and perspicacity.”


The Observer Review
"This book, like Yeats's life, is full of wonderful women and preposterous men. It's an unqualified delight from start to finish."


From Booklist
Although there are many biographies of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, most do not deal effectively with his lifelong involvement with the paranormal. Biographer Maddox focuses on the period after Yeats' marriage to fellow believer in the supernatural, Georgie Hyde-Lees, and thereby concentrates on how interest in the spirit world affected the poet's life and work. It is well known that George, as her husband called her, was adept at "automatic writing," but Maddox implies that her writing was less driven by the spirits than by her own need to manage her husband's behavior. Newly available letters and documents offer insight into Yeats' romantic and sexual liaisons and how they inspired many of his poems. The entire text is interspersed with the poetry written during the period, with an eye to providing insight to the meaning of the poems. Though it is an effectively researched and written addition to the information on Yeats, this book is worth reading for the sheer joy of encountering the poetry within the context that it was written. Danise Hoover


From Kirkus Reviews
With his wife's automatic writing as a guide, Maddox approaches Yeats with the insight and wit she brought to her lives of James Joyces wife (1988) and D. H. Lawrence (1994). This sly and skeptical biography begins essentially where the first volume of R. F. Foster's official, characterless biography closed: with Yeats pursuing poetic inspiration, unattainable women, and spiritualism. While his spectacularly bad love life, notably pining for Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, had fed his poetry for his career's first part, the second phase commenced with an astrologically approved marriage to a fellow member of the mystic Order of the Golden Dawn, almost 30 years his junior but practical, well read, and well matched. As Maddox observes, the awkward newlyweds needed intimacy quickly, since Yeats had just been rejected by Gonne's daughter, Iseult. When George, as she preferred to be called, began to scribble in a trance, she captured Yeats's imagination on every level. The ``Automatic Script,'' consisting of Yeats's questions and her spirit guides' answers, totaling over 3,600 pages amassed over 450 sessions, was published in full in 1992 and forms the most interesting part of Maddox's biography. That sessions provided Yeats with material for his poetry and his philosophic A Vision is well known, but George's surprisingly detailed instructions on conducting their marriage, including their sex life and the conception of their two children, portrays an intimate folie ... deux. Previous biographers, such as Richard Ellmann, accepted George's modest version, but Maddox views George as Yeats's equal in Neoplatonism and occultism and his emotional anchor after so many unstable lovers. Once Yeats got his inspiration out of the sessions, and George her children, the marriage drifted as the new Nobel Laureate pursued more successful love affairs and wrote with renewed energy, and George tended to their offspring and Yeats's literary estate. Even as Yeats experimented with questionable impotence cures and even more questionable eugenics and politics, Maddox never dissociates his superb last verse from his eccentric last years. ``The scatty and the splendid'' sides of Yeats's personality neatly appraised. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



This biography, rich with insight and feminist perspective, will inform future discourse about the literary figure . . .

FROM THE PUBLISHER

William Butter Yeats, who some critics feel was the greatest English language poet of our century, led a life of many contradictions. He was Ireland's most revered writer and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But in his private life, Yeats struggled with passionate, if unrequited, relationships with women and was haunted by the spirits of his ancestors. Renowned biographer Brenda Maddox examines the poet's life through the prism of his personal obsession with the supernatural and otherworldly. She considers for the first time the Automatic Script, the trancelike communication with supposed spirits that he and his much younger wife. Georgie, conducted during the early years of their marriage. Writing with edge, wit, and energy, she finds the essential clues to Yeats's life and work in his unusual relationships with women, most particularly Maude and Iseult Gonne, his wife Georgie, and his rarely discussed mother.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

From his involvement in Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society in the 1880s to his experiments with automatic writing, s ances and mystical literature, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) maintained a lifelong fascination with the occult (Auden would later describe this tendency as "the southern California side of Yeats"). Maddox, author of much-acclaimed biographies of Nora Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, does only a workmanlike job of linking moments in Yeats's verse to specific episodes from his private life (showing, for example, that the mechanical songbird of "Sailing to Byzantium" may have been inspired by a toy duck the poet bought at Harrod's for his son's third birthday). More important to Maddox are Yeats's sexual demons: she untangles various of Yeats's romantic relationships--with Maud and Iseult Gonne; Lady Gregory; his wife, George; and a comely actress or two--and mulls at length over the consequences for Yeats's later poetry of his vasectomy. But she's most informative when discussing the brilliant autodidact's attitudes toward his own creative process, making liberal use of George Mills Harper's 1992 edition of the notes Yeats made toward his mostly incomprehensible book of spiritualist philosophy, A Vision. While not as comprehensive or brilliant as such other Yeats biographies as Richard Ellman's or R.F. Foster's, Maddox's book nonetheless offers an intriguing glimpse into the dark, sometimes steamy, corners of the poet's singular mind. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this New Age, "the academic world is less embarrassed by the paranormal than it used to be," notes Maddox (Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom). Here are two biographies that focus extensively on the psychic interests of renowned poet and playwright Yeats (1865-1939). Both authors acknowledge that spiritualism was popular around the turn of the century as a reaction against scientific developments, and both highlight Yeats's 1917 marriage to the psychic George Hyde-Lees--which Brown terms "one of the strangest acts of imaginative collaboration in all of literary history," with its emphasis on such practices as automatic writing. Brown (English, Trinity Coll., Dublin; Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays) traces Yeats's "Irish instinct for the spooky" to his childhood in a dysfunctional family. Maddox presents Yeats as an eccentric married to a woman shrewd enough to realize that the survival of her marriage depended on proactively supporting her husband's occult obsessions. (Maddox also looks frankly at the Nobel prize winner's relationships with the many women in his life, including patron of the arts, Lady Gregory; the great love of his life, the revolutionary Maud Gonne; and an assortment of mistresses.) While both books are extensively documented and well researched, Brown's is the more academic and analyzes Yeats's major works to a greater extent than Maddox's study. With its conversational style and flashes of wit, Maddox's work is more accessible to general audiences. Brown's book is recommended for academic libraries and Maddox's for both public and academic libraries.--Denise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CT Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

With his wife's automatic writing as a guide, Maddox approaches Yeats with the insight and wit she brought to her lives of James Joyce's wife (1988) and D. H. Lawrence (1994). This sly and skeptical biography begins essentially where the first volume of R. F. Foster's official, characterless biography closed: with Yeats pursuing poetic inspiration, unattainable women, and spiritualism. While his spectacularly bad love life, notably pining for Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, had fed his poetry for his career's first part, the second phase commenced with an astrologically approved marriage to a fellow member of the mystic Order of the Golden Dawn, almost 30 years his junior but practical, well read, and well matched. As Maddox observes, the awkward newlyweds needed intimacy quickly, since Yeats had just been rejected by Gonne's daughter, Iseult. When George, as she preferred to be called, began to scribble in a trance, she captured Yeats's imagination on every level. The "Automatic Script," consisting of Yeats's questions and her spirit guides' answers, totaling over 3,600 pages amassed over 450 sessions, was published in full in 1992 and forms the most interesting part of Maddox's biography. That sessions provided Yeats with material for his poetry and his philosophic A Vision is well known, but George's surprisingly detailed instructions on conducting their marriage, including their sex life and the conception of their two children, portrays an intimate folie à deux. Previous biographers, such as Richard Ellmann, accepted George's modest version, but Maddox views George as Yeats's equal in Neoplatonism and occultism and his emotional anchor after so many unstable lovers. OnceYeats got his inspiration out of the sessions, and George her children, the marriage drifted as the new Nobel Laureate pursued more successful love affairs and wrote with renewed energy, and George tended to their offspring and Yeats's literary estate. Even as Yeats experimented with questionable impotence cures and even more questionable eugenics and politics, Maddox never dissociates his superb last verse from his eccentric last years. "The scatty and the splendid" sides of Yeats's personality neatly appraised. (b&w photos, not seen)