Authorities in the new Irish Free State harassed and murdered Honor Bright before maligning her as a prostitute and acquitting her assassin. The newly founded Garda Siochana spread deceitful rumours and coerced witnesses to conceal Honor's true identity and the real reason for her death. False evidence, perjury and the silencing of potential witnesses led to huge public demonstrations, but newspapers were coerced into printing only authorised stories or else face the consequences from the Garda or Ministry of Justice. Find out why political support moved away from the Free State towards an independent Republic from 1926, and why so many were killed or fled Ireland. And find out what part William Butler and his wife George Yeats played in the process.
William Butler Yeats had an extra-marital lover, Lily O'Neill or Honor Bright, from 1918 to 1925. Garda Superintendent Leopold Dillon murdered her on orders from Kevin O'Higgins, Minister of Justice of the Irish Free State. George, Senator Yeats's wife, reported falsely that Lily was a Republican spy. O'Higgins wanted to restore credence in the Free State, which would otherwise have been reclaimed by the British due to maladministration. Afterwards a bogus trial was concocted outside the court circuit by Chief Superintendent David Neligan, at which Lily was reinvented as a prostitute to conceal Yeats's affair and son, and hide the involvement of Free State officials. On the strength of false evidence the jury unanimously acquitted the assassin after three minutes deliberation.
A re-analysis of W. B. Yeats's most difficult poetry, showing how it was edited to remove all traces of his Catholic lover, Lily O'Neill, and an illegitimate son. This book clearly shows that he was not writing about his wife George, or about Maud or Iseult Gonne. despite the insistence of present-day critics. Find out how Yeats's wife manipulated him into denying all knowledge of his 'most exalted lady' and his first-born son.
This number of Yeats Annual collects the essays resulting from the University College Cork/ESB International Annual W. B. Yeats Lectures Series (2003-2008) by Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue and Helen Vendler. Those that were available in pamphlet form are now collectors’ items, but here is the complete series. These revised essays cover such themes as Yeats and the Refrain, Yeats as a Love Poet, Yeats, Ireland and Europe, the puzzles he created and solved with his art of poetic sequences, and his long and crucial interaction with the emerging T. S. Eliot. The series was inaugurated by a study of Yeats and his Books, which marked the gift to the Boole Library, Cork, of Dr Eamonn Cantwell’s collection of rare editions of books by Yeats (here catalogued by Crónán Ó Doibhlin). Many of the volume’s fifty-six plates offer images of artists’ designs and resulting first editions. This bibliographical theme is continued with Colin Smythe’s census of surviving copies of Yeats’s earliest separate publication, Mosada (1886) and a resultant piece by Warwick Gould on that dramatic poem’s source in the legend of The Phantom Ship. John Kelly reveals Yeats’s ghost-writing for Sarah Allgood; Geert Lernout discovers the source for Yeats’s ‘Tulka’, Günther Schmigalle unearths his surprising connexions with American communist colonists in Virginia, while Deirdre Toomey edits some new letters to the French anarchist, Auguste Hamon—all providing new annotation for standard editions. The volume is rounded with review essays by Colin McDowell (on A Vision, and Berkeley, Hone and Yeats), shorter reviews of current studies by Michael Edwards, Jad Adams and Deirdre Toomey, and obituaries of Jon Stallworthy (Nicolas Barker) and Katharine Worth (Richard Cave).
In this study, which is first of all a folk-lore study, we pursue principally an anthropo-psychological method of interpreting the Celtic belief in fairies, though we do not hesitate now and then to call in the aid of philology; and we make good use of the evidence offered by mythologies, religions, metaphysics, and physical sciences.
From 1800 to 1922 the Irish Question was the most emotional and divisive issue in British politics. It pitted Westminster politicians, anti-Catholic British public opinion, and Irish Protestant and Presbyterian champions of the Union against the determination of Ireland's large Catholic majority to obtain civil rights, economic justice, and cultural and political independence. In this completely revised and updated edition of The Irish Question, Lawrence J. McCaffrey extends his classic analysis of Irish nationalism to the present day. He makes clear the tortured history of British-Irish relations and offers insight into the difficulties now facing those who hope to create a permanent peace in Northern Ireland.
