A New life Of W. B. Yeats
Brenda Maddox, one of the foremost chroniclers of literary lives, brings all her talents to bear on one of the most written about but least understood literary giants of the twentieth century: W.B. Yeats. Many know the public Yeats but few have managed to penetrate to the inner man, or to explore the relationship with his much younger wife, George.
'George's Ghosts' looks at Yeats through the lens of the Automatic Script, the trance-like communication with supposed spirits that George conducted during the early years of their marriage. The full transcript of this intense occult adventure was not available until 1992 and remains virtually untouched by biographers. Maddox finds the Script to have been a ghostly form of family planning, as well as one of the most ingenious ploys ever used by a wife to take her husband's mind off another woman.
There are also flashes back to Yeats's early years to the least examined woman in his life, his silent dreamy mother, and Maddox anaylses the mature Yeats with new information and a sharp feminine perspective and relates them all to the triumph of his late poetry.
While much as been written about Yeats, no one before has managed to convey the humane nature of the man and get behind the smiling public image to expose the intense privacy and passions of a powerful and often misunderstood artist. Brenda Maddox does this with great skill - undoubtefddly her finest biography.
