Olivia Shakespear: Letters to W. B. Yeats

Abstract

The thirty-seven letters printed below seem to be all that survive from Olivia Shakespear’s side of a correspondence spanning the years 1894 to 1938. Allan Wade printed 121 letters from Yeats to Olivia Shakespear: only about ten further letters to her survive, and most of these are very short. Wade was, however, forced to make significant cuts in some of the letters he did print. Commenting on the letters which did not survive, he remarked: “After Mrs Shakespear’s death in October 1938, her son-in-law, Ezra Pound, sent back to Yeats all the letters from him which she had kept, and these unfortunately reached him while he was staying away from home, and some of them he destroyed, apparently at random” (L 12).