W.B. Yeats and Olivia Shakespear: For Sale at Sotheby's

News broke today of the upcoming auction of Yeats: The Family Collection. On September 27, in London, Sothebys will be selling a vast array of items from the lives of the poet and Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats, painter Jack B. Yeats, and artists and publishers Elizabeth Lolly and Susan Mary Lily Yeats. The Yeats collection, some of which has been shown and indeed some given to the National Library of Ireland, has been in family hands until now.

Much fascinating ephemera, as well as major literary documents and paintings, is to be sold, according to the catalogue. From childhood sketches to major oils, photographs and Cuala prints, personally decorated trunks, model ships, silver teapots, chessboards, chairs and candlesticks, the collection offers a fascinating insight into the Yeats household, their interests, personal connections and endless creativity. What stopped me in my tracks is a lot of letters. A lot of letters, in terms of an auction lot and, also, a lot of letters, circa a hundred and thirty-three. They were written by W.B. Yeats between 1904 and 1936, and all are to a woman named Olivia Shakespear.

Many, indeed most, of them may have already been published in print or in the capacious Intelex Yeats. That is not the point. The point is that Shakespear was Yeatss first lover, remained one of his oldest and closest friends, and was the recipient of very early draft versions of some of his most celebrated poems. Even in this image above, made available by Sothebys, a shard of a song from Yeatss 1934 version of Sophocless Oedipus at Colonus peeks out from the center.

For forty years, from the end of their first affair until her death, only shortly before his, in October 1938, Olivia Shakespear was the one soul who made no intense demands upon Yeats, expected nothing in particular of him after the end of their first affair, and shared with him the grace of her company, conversation, and her London homes. Shakespear was the one person upon whom Yeats could rely to give him her honest opinions on nearly all matters, without intrusions of self-interest, business, politics, and personal agendas. Yeats only really wrote of her in a memoir that did not appear until 1972.

Born on St. Patricks Day, 1863, Olivia Tucker was a well-educated and very beautiful upper-middle-class lady when she married London lawyer Hope Shakespear. The marriage was not a happy one, though both parents doted on their only child, daughter Dorothy who would marry Ezra Pound in 1914. Olivia began to write fiction in the early 1890s, and published her first novel, Love On A Mortal Lease, in 1894. All her novels are powerful accounts of Victorian and Edwardian women who triumph over class, expectations, and men to succeed artistically or are killed by the effort. She also wrote book reviews and plays. Most notably, her 1896 novella Beautys Hour, only reprinted a century later in 2016 , is a remarkable feminist revision of Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

Yeats published Beautys Hour novella in The Savoy, a literary and art magazine he was helping his London roommate, Arthur Symons, edit and publish at the time. Yeats and Shakespear had met in early 1894 and were immediately attracted to each other; however, she was married, and he had been smitten with Maud Gonne since 1889. To his credit, Yeats admitted in his memoirs that he told Shakespear early on of his love sorrow and feelings for Gonne. Gonne, however, was not only unresponsive, but involved with the married French politician and journalist Lucien Millevoye, whose children Georges and Iseult she bore secretly, in France, in 1890 and 1894. Yeats was brutally honest about his decision to have an affair with Shakespear: after all, if I could not get the woman I loved, it would be a comfort even but for a little while to devote myself to another. He wrote love poems about a woman with long, dark dim hair, and he and Shakespear met in train stations and museums in order to be, very publicly, alone. Finally, Yeats got a room of his own in Bloomsbury:

At last she came to me in I think January of my thirtieth [thirty-first] year, and I was impotent from nervous excitement. The next day we met at the British Museum we were studying together and I wondered that there seemed no change in me or in her. A week later she came to me again, and my nervous excitement was so painful that it seemed best but to sit over our tea and talk. I do not think we kissed each other except at the moment of her leaving. She understood instead of, as another would, changing liking for dislike was only troubled by my trouble. My nervousness did not return again and we had many days of happiness. It will always be a grief to me that I could not give the love that was her beautys right, but she was too near my soul, too salutary and wholesome to my inmost being.

Shakespear considered leaving her husband for Yeats, though it would have cost her her social position, her home, and her daughter. But Yeats could not forget about Gonne. In early 1897, Shakespear said to him, There is someone else in your heart, and ended the affair. His poem Aodh to Dectora, or The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love, is about the incident.

Pale brow, still hands, dim hair,

I had a beautiful friend,

And dreamed that the old despair

Might fade in love in the end:

She looked in my heart one day,

And saw your image was there,

She has gone weeping away.

* * *

By 1901, they were friends, and perhaps more, and constant correspondents again. In 1917, Yeats would marry Georgie Hyde-Lees, the stepdaughter of Shakespears brother Henry Tucker who he had met at Shakespears home. When he asked her to, Shakespear returned Yeatss letters to her. Very few of hers to him are believed to survive, but perhaps the Sothebys sale catalogue, when published in full, will reveal other truths.

Upon learning of Shakespears sudden death from a heart attack, in October 1938, Yeats had this reaction: For more than forty years she has been the centre of my life in London and during all that time we have never had a quarrel, sadness sometimes but never a difference. When I first met her she was in her late twenties but in looks a lovely young girl. When she died she was a lovely old woman. She was not more lovely than distinguished no matter what happened she never lost her solitude. She was Lionel Johnsons cousin and felt and thought as he did. For the moment I cannot bear the thought of London. I will find her memory everywhere.

Yeatss letters to Shakespear have an estimate of 250,000-300,000. Heres hoping that a library will purchase them and preserve them all together just as they were, once upon a time, returned to their writer by the lady who received them.

For more on Olivia Shakespear, read her novella Beautys Hour .

all quotations from Yeatss Memoirs Macmillan