Julia, Theatre, a novel by Somerset Maugham

I picked this novel up a few years ago and then saw a dreadful film adaptation of it, called “Being Julia”.  

I enjoyed the novel as a short and a relatively easy pleasant read. However, on the negative side, while I don’t expect all characters in a book to be lovable, a book with no likable characters can be a bit off putting. There's really no-one in this book that I like or approve of, and they are only mildly interesting to me. Julia is an actress who "acts all the time"... and Maugham seems to agree with her son that really Julia doesn't exist. She was wildly in love with her husband Michael, when they met, and for a time, but then She fell out of love with him, and began to see his character as dull, complacent, cheap and pompous. Within a few years of marriage, she's bored with him and has gone off sex with him. She has a son, Roger, but he doesn't seem to mean much to her. He later tells her that she only ever saw him, (the son) as a pretty little boy she could be photographed with, who looked cute in pictures of the "actress as an adoring mother".  and it is hard to disagree with him about this.  She never comes across as being a mother at all.

Julia's predicaments are amusing, but even when she is unhappy it is hard to feel sorry for her. She falls in love with a much younger man, and they have an affair, which gives her a lot of pleasure and thrills. Yet even with this man, it is hard to see real affection. She buys him things and gives him money, but when he begins to grow a bit tired of the affair, she very nastily makes him realise that he is her "kept boy" and that she has power over him. She then finds that he has been seeing other women, younger ones...and has been boasting of how she "eats out of his hand". He's not a very nice character, but Julia then takes a revenge on his new girlfriend, a young actress who is working with her. 

It really is hard to like anyone in the book and while there is plenty to laugh at, there is a feeling that one's usually laughing at the characters rather than with them. Julia is devoted to her acting and we see her, having shrugged off her infatuation for Tom, her young lover, planning to play Hamlet...It’s nice to see a woman who isn't all the time depending on male admiration or affection but she is cold at heart and vulgar. Maugham claims to be fond of her, but the novel makes me feel a vulgar strain in his nature...

I loved Constant Wife, but this seems to show the other side of Maugham.. the catty side.. which seems to dislike women…

Constant Wife Somerset Maugham

I went to the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and enjoyed a performance of “The Constant Wife” by Somerset Maugham.  It was an attractive “well-made play”, with an interesting theme, good acting, charming costumes and set design.  Kudos to the cast and director, who managed to do accents, and who managed to make the characters sound a little affected, but not to the point where they become overdone and irritating.  I find the older I get, the more I prefer  a “middle range” play – something that is not full of intellectual discussion or “deep and meaningful themes” but  a play that covers a subject, has some witty and clever lines but does not  pretend to be more than it is.
“Constant Wife” is quite a daring play for its time.  Constance, the wife of a well to do and successful Harley Street doctor, has time on her hands.  She hasn’t got much to do, with her servants running the house.  Her husband is frequently unfaithful and his latest affair is with one of her friends.   Well-meaning friends and relatives nag at her, advising her to confront her husband - but she doesn’t wish to do so.  An old boyfriend of hers has just returned to England, after living abroad for some time. Constance has a platonic friendship with him, which her husband does not mind about. 
 She does not feel able to confront her husband because she does not feel she is on an equal footing with him.  She is depending on him financially.  While in theory, as a wife, most people would say that her work of running his home and rearing children gives her the right to consider herself his equal, and to speak up to him, but, she does not feel that it does.
Constance is willing to admit that for a modern middle class wife, there isn’t much to do. Servants run the house, labour saving devices make this much easier than it used to be. Nurses and schools take care of the children and helping to run her husband’s social life is not really that demanding.
Maugham had a rather ambiguous attitude to women and sometimes was hostile to daring and sexually free ones, but in Constant Wife, he has Constance bravely acknowledge her lack of “equality” within the marriage. 
When her girlfriend’s husband finally gets suspicious that his wife is having an affair with Constance’s husband, the resourceful “constant wife” cleverly covers up, explaining away the suspicious circumstances and allaying his fears.   She suggests that the couple go away for a while to mend their marriage.
While they are away, Constance makes a decision, and having refused a friend’s offer to give her a job in interior decorating, she now decides to take up the work.  Over a year or so, she earns money at the job, and begins to feel that now she is on an equal footing with her husband.  She tells him that she has put money in his bank account, from what she has earned and that that is paying for her keep for the past year.  So now, she gives him a polite hint that she’s going away with her old admirer.  They will be discreet about it, but she means to engage in an affair.  And he can’t really say anything.  She has supported herself for the past year, with the money she made on her job... (Syrie Maugham, Maugham's wife was a very successful interior designer).

Constance tells her husband that she is not surprised that he has grown bored with her sexually.  Just because he wanted to sleep with her years ago, that does not mean that he is going to feel the same sexual passion for the rest of his life.  The final scene where Constance tells her husband that she will be a “constant wife” if not a faithful one, where he is rather annoyed but in fairness, can’t say very much, is funny and very sharp.  Maugham is insistent that if women want independence, they have to work for it... Then they can have the sexual freedom and general independence that men have usually had….a refreshingly sensible moderate point o of view which does not lean towards feminism or “male chauvinism”!!

I enjoyed the play very much and would love to see more Maugham plays being done.

Georgette Heyer's novels Part II

Heyer’s earlier works were more adventure stories, later she turned more to comedies of manners.  The first books written in her 20s were set in Georgian England.  This time had something of a “Wild West” feel about it - there were highwaymen, lawlessness and it wasn’t unknown for noblemen to kidnap heiresses and force them into marriage or to take young working class girls all but forcibly as mistresses. 
 Heyer used these facts in order to put together good rollicking adventure stories, such as Black Moth, where the lovely Diana is kidnapped by a wealthy nobleman who wants to marry her, but does not care if he has to force into the marriage.  She is rescued by John Carstares, another nobleman who has had to leave England for some years due to taking the blame for cheating at cards.  He has lived abroad, and then come back to England, and lived as a highwayman…Eventually he saves Dian’s virtue, and his brother, who had been the one who cheated, takes the blame.  Jack is restored to his earldom and family estate with his new wife.

 "These Old Shades” has a plot where Justin Alistair, a selfish and rakish man of 40, meets a young street urchin who turns out to be the daughter of his enemy, the Comte De St Vire.  He takes Leonie into his household, as his page sicne she has been dressing as a boy, to avoid molestation.  Justin hopes to use her to shame St Vire, but he falls in love with her and marries her.

The stories are good, if improbable, and even then Heyer was working towards what became her trademark, witty banter, using period slang, and convoluted and comical plotting…
She usually had a few young men of the kind that PG Wodehouse called “drones”, in her novels.  These are idle but good natured young men who spend their time amusing themselves but do not do any harm to anyone.  Their lively conversation, misunderstandings and good natured banter are fun to read, and as Heyer matured as a writer, she began to produce more of these sorts of characters rather than dastardly villains and heroes.  Another trope of hers was the bored young society wife who has a rather dull husband whom she loves, but who seeks amusement, with livelier men as companions.
 As her writing developed, she was able to write plots that had no particular villain and no elopements, gaming debts, abductions or duels.
Her stories moved on to social comedy, about a young woman having her social debut, and learning how to navigate her way through Society and to find a husband.  Occasionally, the plot involves a “fake betrothal”, where a couple pretend to be engaged.
Or in some cases, a couple marry for reasons of convenience and then discover that they are in love.
In her last novels, her heroines are rather older than the debutante age, and are usually young women well into their twenties, who have been out in society for some time but have not found a man whom they wished to marry. They often have a role as mother substitute to younger siblings or a niece. So her heroines matured from “young and rather silly and naïve” to more intelligent and practical, as she herself grew older and her writing became deeper and more serious.

Georgette Heyer Part I

Georgette Heyer, queen of Regency novelists, inventor of the genre, was born in Wimbledon in 1902.  She was from a middle class family, not very rich, but like most middle class people of the time, very status conscious.  She had a good education, but like most girls at that time did not attend university.  She always wanted to be a writer, and in her teens she wrote the story that became her first historical romance, “The Black Moth.”  It was set in Georgian England and was typical of her early work in that it had rather strained “archaic” language, culled from other novelists such as Baroness Orczy and Jeffery Farnol.  It was highly adventurous, with duels, drama, card games for high stakes, and a villain who kidnaps the heroine, intending to force her to marry him.   It is less historically accurate than most of her later works.  She was very young, and her historical knowledge was probably limited, so she concerned herself mostly with writing a good rollicking story to amuse her young brother who was ill. A few years later, she revised the story and it was published as her first novel. For such a young writer, it was quite an achieving.  It isn’t as polished and good as her later novels, but it is still very readable and the faults don’t take away from the energy and wit with which it was written.

Her family were far from rich and she needed to earn a living…She had friends, including Carola Oman and Joanna Cannan, (both of whom were successful novelists but whose work has not remained so popular); who also planned to write for a living, with whom she could discuss her work and plans. Writing had become a respectable career for a middle class girl…or even an upper class woman in need of money.   One didn’t need formal training or a university education, and it was work which could be done after marriage. Her father who had taught at Kings College London, had ensured she had been well educated, for her time.  She had also met with other young women who had similar interests.  “Black Moth” was a success, and she went on writing and for some years, she produced different sorts of novels.  She wrote 4 contemporary novels based on her “real life at the time”, which she later removed from publication. 

As a young woman, she was attractive, perhaps not conventionally pretty, but dark and smart-looking and she enjoyed a social life.  As she grew older, she became almost reclusive, except for the sort of social events that were expected from the wife of a professional man.   In 1925, she married Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer.   Her beloved father died suddenly just before the wedding. But her marriage was a success.  She and Ronald were married for almost 50 years and were devoted to each other.  However, he was not rich and she went on with her writing, to help him financially.  Some years into their marriage, he decided to give up his work, and train for the Bar, which he had always wanted to do.  He had tried his hand at a couple of other jobs, such as running a shop, but Georgette became the main wage earner and supported them during his training.  She also had brothers who were not very successful with money and found herself helping them out financially as well.

She loved her work but she undoubtedly developed a feeling at times of being burdened with financial commitments so as to help her husband and then her siblings and her elderly widowed mother.  She gradually became more reclusive, and refused to do any PR for her books insisting that her private life was private and that it was not necessary to give interviews or talk about herself, in order to sell her works. When her husband qualified as a barrister, he had social commitments that he had to comply with, relating to his Bar work.   Georgette was willing to do these with them, but she seems to have withdrawn from most other socialising and spent more of her time with her husband, mother and brothers... for company.  Always conservative minded, she became more and more right wing.  She didn’t care for the Welfare State, feeling that she worked very hard, and brought a lot of money into the UK, only for the government to take it and waste it on social programmes she didn’t feel were necessary.  She had a son, Richard, in 1932 - her only child -and tried to ensure that he had a good education.  He later followed his father into the legal profession.   But Heyer was so busy with her work that it’s said that he felt a bit left out and ignored by his Mother and their relationship wasn’t always easy.

In addition to her financial commitments to help her family, she was personally rather extravagant and not very good with managing money, so she was often hit with tax bills that meant she had to write something in a hurry to pay a bill.
She wrote several detective stories the 1920s and 30s.  However, she gave up writing them when she was more financially secure.  She used her husband for advice on the legal and mechanical side and the collaboration was a lot less successful than with her historical works.  However the detective novels were reasonably popular and sold well.  Her romances sold much better.

Heyer’s first novels were set mainly in Georgian times, and were rather like the Black Moth, in having distinctive and dastardly villains, a lot of excitement and adventure and improbable plots.  They are built around events such as abductions, duels, quarrels, and people pretending to be someone else, or even “swapping gender”.  In The Masquerades,   Robin and Prudence Tremayne, brother and sister, are on the run because of his participation In the Jacobite Rising, and they have to disguise themselves, to avoid detection.  Robin, who is small and slim, poses as a woman, Kate and Prudence, a large sturdily built girl, is Peter.   Robin seems to make a convincing young lady,  and Prudence has to pose as  a man and “hold her own” with young bucks of the town…There are other times in early Heyer where her leading lady dresses and poses as a boy, Penelope in “The Corinthian” and Leonie, In “These Old Shades”.

Heyer was a somewhat “male oriented” woman, preferring masculine company... she enjoyed being with her brothers and her husband, and her father, though she did have some close female friends.  In her early writings, she disguised some of her female characters as boys, so that they could have more freedom to “roam around and have adventures” than they could have had, within the confines of upper class propriety at the time.  Later books abandoned this sort of plot, and her women were more realistic.  Even if they had masculine interests such as riding or shooting, they had their fair share of feminine wiles and were usually good housekeepers.
End of Part I

Jean Plaidy

Jean Plaidy was one of the most prolific and well known historical novelists, who wrote   a large body of light fiction, mostly covering the royal families of England and Europe. However she was born in modest circumstances in Canning Town, East London in 1906.  Her birth name was Eleanor Alice Burford.   In spite of her coming from a very ordinary family, she had a good education.  Her family sent her to a private school, since health problems meant she could not attend school full time.   At 16, she went to a business college to learn to type... and then started work at various jobs, including selling gems in Hatton Gardens, and translating for foreign tourists.  
There is no biography for her, as yet, but photographs show her as an attractive young woman.  She was in her early 20s when she married Joseph HIbbert,   a man many years her senior, who had children from a previous marriage.   He was a businessman.  Her marriage was a lasting and happy one and it gave her financial security, to try her hand at writing.  She wrote several novels before she hit on something that sold and then began to write various types of historical fiction.  She used different pseudonyms, such as Philippa Carr for her “Daughters of England” series, and Victoria Holt for Gothic romances which she wrote in the 1960s.  She also wrote thrillers and crime fiction, but it was her Gothics and historical works that sold best.

Her first Gothic, Mistress of Mellyn, wove elements of previous novels such as Jane Eyre and “Rebecca” by Daphne Du Maurier. 
Plaidy had started off with serious modern novels, which were very long, but none of them attracted a publisher.  Gradually, as the 1930s progressed, she turned to more saleable works, including romantic fiction and light works.  She wrote 10 novels for Mills and Boon.  She was becoming a steady and successful writer.   In the 1940s during the War, she and her husband lived in Cornwall where she was able to write, and she lived near Plaidy Beach which gave her her most famous pen name. 
Like Georgette Heyer, Plaidy could claim to be the founder of a new type of historical novel.  Heyer invented the Regency romance; Plaidy was more general.  Many of her works concentrate on Queens of England or France.   One of the first of her books that I read as a teenager was “Murder Most Royal” which was a novel of Anne Boleyn and partly about her younger cousin Catherine Howard.    Later on, Plaidy wrote novels about both queens, using more recent historical research.   Like Heyer, she didn’t have a university education, but she was intelligent and a good writer and able to incorporate her research into her novels, without “dumping” it into the books, too much.  However, I get the feeling that she tended to rely on more conservative sources and at times too, she was somewhat anachronistic in how she perceived her characters, judging them from a modern point of view. She had a vehement prejudice against Henry VIII because of the “way he treated his wives”.

She was hard working and prolific as a writer, usually dedicating 5 hours a day to her work even in old age. She usually went on a cruise in the winter, as she grew older, to get away from the cold English winter.  She would work each day, for some time and then play chess.  
After her husband’s death – which was a great sadness to her, she settled in Kensington London, with a woman companion sharing her flat.  She used the large Kensington central library, with its collection of old books, for research, and was allowed to take books home and kept them as long as she liked. (A privilege I wish that I could have!). She still worked very hard, and produced 91 Jean Plaidy novels alone.
She died in 1993, on a cruise, in the Mediterranean, having had a long and successful life and writing career. I wish that there was a biography of her, and hope that one will come out soon.  Some of her work seems rather dated now, but she started me wanting to write and gave me my obsession with Anne Boleyn!

Sam... taster from Beds and Blue jeans (Available on Amazon)

He found himself mentally re-running the fight he and Pattie had had that afternoon when he left the house to go to work. He had just wanted something to eat and a clean shirt to take with him, so that he could change before he went home. That didn’t seem a lot to ask. He got no food and a few abusive words.
In a temper, he had walked out early. He had gone over to Reed’s house where he bummed a meal off the drummer and his wife. He had managed to find a clean T shirt, to take with him, so he had something fresh to change into.
Sam gave another heavy sigh, as he sat holding the beer, letting his hands chill. It was a hell of a bad situation. He didn’t expect his girl to wait on him hand and foot; if Pattie had had a job, even a part time one, he would have expected less. But she didn’t have a job and did so little around the house; it wasn’t as if she was exhausting herself with cooking and cleaning. Was it asking too much that he got a cooked meal and clean clothes without his having to complain and argue?
Reed and Kelly lived quite close by. Their house was small too, but they were more solvent, because Kelly had a job. So far, they had not had any kids. But he knew that if he went there for a meal, Kelly would soon be yelling at her husband over “Sam’s selfish ways."
Available on Amazon

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beds-Blue-Jeans-everyday-mayhem-ebook/dp/B01370SMFO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468214580&sr=8-1&keywords=Beds+and+blue+jeans

If you dont like Hank WIlliams Part II,story of Bocephus

Randall Hank Williams was the only child of Hank Williams by his wife Audrey.  He was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1949.  He was only a young child, when his father died, tragically and at the age of 29, on a trip to a New Year’s Gig.   
Audrey his mother was traumatized by her stormy marriage and the divorce from Hank Senior but after his death, she saw herself as the keeper of his legacy.    Even though he had married another woman after their divorce. 
Audrey  pressured her son to sing his father’s hits and she managed him, trying to make money out of the songs that were his father’s.  Hank Junior (sometimes known by his father’s nickname for him, Bocephus) had a strong and powerful country voice and great instrumental talent and he went along with his mother’s “pushing” as a boy. However it was increasingly difficult for him to live up to people’s expectations of him, particularly his mother’s.  He loved country music but he also loved rock -and as he grew older, he wanted to step out from his father’s shadow and to work at the music he himself liked.   He knew all the country and early rock and roll “Greats” from Jerry Lee Lewis to Johnny  and June Carter Cash (June Carter was his godmother). 
In spite of this, he was increasingly unhappy with being forced to sing the old Hank Williams classics when he wanted to strike out in a new direction.  His mother was possessive and difficult and in spite of the money from Hank’s hits, there were financial problems.
As he grew older, the pressures on Hank, made him more depressed.  He turned, like his father, to drink and drugs.   His first marriage, when he was very young, was short lived.  His second marriage, to Gwen Yeargain, produced his first child -Shelton Hank Williams (now known as Hank III) but again, he was unhappy and finding it hard to cope with marriage or fatherhood.  
Hank Junior then made a suicide attempt but survived.  He and his wife had separated and he was desperately unhappy.  Then in 1975 he went mountain climbing in Montana and fell 500 feet down a mountain.  The accident almost killed him.  He survived but with serious scarring of his face.  He was traumatized seriously by this and it took some time before he fully recovered.  He had plastic surgery which repaired his face.  The psychological wounds remained.  From then on, he started to wear a hat and sunshades, on stage, and grew a beard to hide the scars.
He married again and had more children, but the damage done to his relationship with his eldest child was still there.  He tried to spend time with his son, but Hank III felt neglected.   However, in the 70s’ after the accident,  Bocephus  began to branch into the sort of music that he really wanted to do, singing  Southern Rock. while still paying tribute to his father’s country hits.   He still had addictions to drink and drugs, and while he was immensely popular and successful, his addictions sometimes interfered with his performances.  
Hank’s voice is as strong as ever, though he’s now in his 60s and he is great at playing to an audience.   His musical ability has not diminished as he’s grown older.  His life is more settled now and he is as successful as ever with his music. Like his father, he is a Republican supporter and he has caused some controversy with some of his slightly unorthodox political statements.  But in spite of the dramas and tragedies of his early life, he has fulfilled his early musical promise.  Two of his best known songs are Family Tradition, in which he remarks that if he gets drunk and sings, stoned, and does crazy things, he's only following a "family tradition"...and another is "All my Rowdy Friends have settled down" about the approach of middle age and how it has slowed down his and his friends' roistering...

Ray Sawyer of Doctor Hook Farewell Tour

I’ve been a Hook fan for a while, but had never seen Ray Sawyer live, and hoped that someday; he would do a tour of Ireland or England, where I could catch his act.   The opportunity came about a year ago when I went to one of the concerts on his farewell tour.   There was a support act, and then Ray came on about 8.15 pm... Cayce his son was playing drums. Ray was 77, and he was looking a bit frail but still full of life!  His hair was now long and grey.   I know that for some years, his voice has been declining in quality, but I was thrilled to have the chance to see him, in the flesh.

I knew that I was going to enjoy it.  He still has the verve and outgoing warmth that have made him such a delightful performer. Ray always will be a showman. When he sang the first 3 songs, I thought that although his voice wasn’t perfect, he was still pretty good.  His voice then began to decline and roughen a bit, but overall I loved him. I always loved the way that he has of throwing himself into performances.  I can’t remember all the songs, but he started with Walk Right in and finished with Sylvia’s Mother. 

Other songs were the “Wonderful Soup Stone”…and “You make my pants want to get up and dance” and “Cover of the Rolling Stone” and “Baby Makes her Blue jeans talk”.  He spoke a few times about Shel Silverstein...He finished up about 9.30 pm but then came back on, and did about 3 or 4 more songs... Including Sylvia’s Mother and his old blues favourite “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”. He finished with his usual last song “Goodnight Sweetheart it’s time to go”.

 He was in fine form and it was a delight to see him.  I love Dr Hook and Ray was a lynch pin of that band, and I’m glad that he managed to have a successful post band career.  And I now hope that he has a long and happy retirement.

Emily Bronte -some theories

Emily Bronte’s life was short, pitifully so, and it was and is very much of a mystery.  Her biographers and literary critics are puzzled by her, and as Margaret Lane points out, she just kept herself to herself to such an extent that it is nearly impossible to know what happened to her or why she was the way she was.
We do not know why she became so reclusive or why her one novel is so hard to understand.
Lane notes the very bizarre theories that some critics and biographers come up with, and admits that she prefers critics who admit that they do not know and base their ideas on the work and the few facts known, who do not try to theorise too much.
We know almost nothing of Emily.  We only have access to a few letters and as she had no friends outside her family, there was no one whom she confided in.   Her only times spent away from home were when she went to school for a while to Miss Woolers’- the school where Charlotte had received her education, the time she went to Brussels with her sister, to attend a well-known school and learn French, and when she spent a short time teaching at a school called Law Hill.
Generally -she seems to have been unhappy away from Yorkshire.  She left Miss Wooler’s school, as a girl, because absence from her home was making her ill.  Later, she stayed for some time in Brussels and at Law Hill but it seems that she wasn’t very happy in either place and only stayed out of duty.  While Charlotte found Brussels interesting, and went back there after the death of her aunt, Emily returned to Haworth and never left it. She had acquired some education and knowledge of French and that was enough for her. On her aunt’s death -the 3 girls all inherited a little money and she kept house at the Parsonage, from then on.  She had sufficient money not to have to seek a job.
Charlotte still wished for engagement with the larger world, but Emily was contented with her home, and absolutely refused to leave it.
Margaret Lane thinks that we simply don’t know what caused her to withdraw from the world, to avoid relationships with people outside her family, and to refuse to go away from home. But even within her family, she was not always very friendly, quarrelling with Charlotte when the latter found her poems and wanted her to publish them... When she did live away from home, she wasn’t greatly liked.  Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, Charlotte’s 2 good friends, seem to have gotten on reasonably well with her, but they weren’t close.
When she was forced to mix with others, at the Brussels school; she was so odd in her ways and off-putting that mostly people did not find it easy to develop any relationship with her.  M Heger, husband of the headmistress, who taught both young women, admired Emily but thought her egotistical.  She didn’t appear to like him very much either... Charlotte wrote that “Emily and he don’t draw well together at all”.
It is possible, I think, to theorise that perhaps her mother’s early death, made her suspicious of her fellow humans. Perhaps she turned to her writing, her inner world, her mystic conception of God and also to loving animals, rather than trying to make friends with the outside world. She lost her mother when she was only 3, and at 6, was then sent to the school where her older sisters as a result of bad hygiene, “starvation rations” and generally harsh treatment.
Charlotte perhaps remembered her mother and her mother’s sustaining affection better and was willing to try and relate to other people, but Emily had less memories of this and probably was traumatised by the Cowan Bridge School. She may have found it safest to retreat to her Haworth home and the family members whom she trusted and to refuse to ever come out of it, willingly again... And she also may have found human beings outside her family so hard to understand, or so cruel (if one thinks of the Cowan Bridge experience) that she didn’t want to trust any of them or try to love anyone.

Yeats Poet and activist

William Butler Yeats was born in 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin.  He became one of the greatest poets of the 20^th Century, and possibly the greatest Irish poet.  He was born into the Anglo Irish ascendancy class, though not to the richest or grandest of its ranks.  His mother’s family, the Pollexfens were merchants, and in former times adventurers and seafarers, based in Sligo. His father was descended from an Anglo Irish soldier and there was an artistic streak running in the Yeats family. His father, John Yeats, was an artist and the family spent time in London and in Ireland.  Yeats was educated mostly in London. For some time the family lived in Bedford Park, a suburb of North London, which housed artists and socialists.
He did not do very well at formal education but his literary talent was there from an early age.  He had a passionate interest in the various “spiritual” movements of the 19^th century, Theosophy, Dublin Hermetic Order and Irish mythology.  He had little interest in the conservative Anglicanism of his class, preferring to seek wisdom through unconventional paths.
In 1889, he met the woman he loved, for many years, she was an English heiress called Maud Gonne.  Although she was the daughter of a British soldier, Gonne identified with the Irish and dedicated herself to working for the Irish poor. Yeats was liberal minded in some way but at heart he was something of a romantic reactionary,  who believed that the Irish upper class (with whom he identified) and the peasantry had more in common with each other than they had with the middle classes. However, politically he sympathized with the Irish literary revival and the move for Home Rule and complete independence of the British connection.  He grew to dislike the Irish well to do trading classes, for many reasons, including their lack of culture.  However, particularly when the 1913 Lock Out happened, causing terrible distress among the Irish working class, already one of the poorest in Europe, he had distaste for their lack of compassion.  He had real sympathy with the poor, but was not a radical in his solutions to labor questions.

Maud Gonne was more radical - but she had certain sympathy with right wing movements in France, and had had an affair with Lucien Millevoye, a right wing journalist. He supported the movement to get back the province of Alsace Lorraine from Germany, for France.   Maud was very unconventional for a Victorian woman and led her own life, with her own moral code.  Generally Victorian upper and middle class women were virgins until they married.  However she became Millevoye’s lover and had 2 children by him but their births were kept secret -and Yeats did not realize she was already involved with another man.  She felt that he was not radical enough in his nationalism, and that it was better for his poetry that he should not marry.  Yeats turned to another woman - Olivia Shakespear - a minor novelist, who became his good friend and mistress for a couple of years in the 1890s. But he continued to love Maud for many years, and called his relationship with her “the troubling of my life”.  Even when they disagreed, he had a passionate loyalty to her.

His early poetry was “Celtic Twilight”, romantic and ornate, using love and themes from Irish Mythology. As time went on, he began to involve other themes, such as political ones and more earthy imagery… I will discuss more of his poetry and later life in the next part of the blog.