John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London: Macmillan, 1989) xvi + 218 pp.

Abstract

Yeats’s account in his Memoirs of his love affair with Olivia Shakespear (“Diana Vernon”) and his letters to and about Mrs Shakespear (there are 121 letters in Allen Wade’s edition, all but one dating from the period after 1923 when Olivia’s husband, Hope Shakespear, died) provide us with a tantalising image of fin de siècle romance — a romance between a married and hitherto virtuous femme de trente ans and a man roughly the same age, already a famous poet, who, because of his unrequited love for another woman, has remained a virgin. In the poem “Friends” (1912), Olivia Shakespear is the second of the “Three women that have wrought/What joy is in my days”; she is the one whose

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Had strength that could unbind What none can understand, What none can have and thrive, Youth’s dreamy load, till she So changed me that I live Labouring in ecstasy.

(VP 315)