Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne and the French politician and journalist Lucien Millevoye, attracted many admirers - among them distinguished authors such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Arthur Symms, Lennox Robinson, Francis Stuart and Liam O'Flaherty. Yeats proposed marriage to her, Ezra Pound had a secret, passionate love affair with her and she married Francis Stuart. This book contains her hitherto unpublished letters to Yeats and Pound, edited and annotated by Anna MacBride White (Maud Gonne's granddaughter), Christina Bridgwater (Iseult's granddaughter) and A. Norman Jeffares, the distinguished Yeats scholar.
'...this book is clearly a labour of love...MacBride brilliantly describes Iseult's extraordinary early life...and the benign, forlorn and lost dignity of her final years. Norman Jeffares provides an interesting account of her relationship with Pound...while Iseult's granddaughter, Christina Bridgewater, writes a moving forward.' - Dermot Bolger, Sunday Independent
'The copious footnotes help paint a picture if the young girl who fascinated all who came close to her, while the letters follow Yeats' passion for a girl 30 yeas his junior.' - Belfast Telegraph
'These letters are despatches from a life that should have been a novel...The bare facts suggest a dramatic life, intersecting with brilliant people; the great value of these letters is to extent the picture, bringing light and depth to the portrait of someone who fascinated most people she met, but was in the end unable to make her existence cohere.' - Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement
'The copious footnotes help paint a picture if the young girl who fascinated all who came close to her, while the letters follow Yeats' passion for a girl 30 yeas his junior.' - Belfast Telegraph
'These letters are despatches from a life that should have been a novel...The bare facts suggest a dramatic life, intersecting with brilliant people; the great value of these letters is to extent the picture, bringing light and depth to the portrait of someone who fascinated most people she met, but was in the end unable to make her existence cohere.' - Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement