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Deirdre Toomey Margaret Ward, Maud Gonne: Ireland's joan of Arc (London: Pandora, I990) X I+ I 2II pp. Margery Brady, The Love Story of Yeats and Maud Gonne (Cork: Mercier Press, I990) I28 pp. Deirdre Toomey Margaret Ward's is the best life of Maud Gonne so far. But that is faint praise. The author has the great advantage of not being at a loss when dealing with Irish politics, and her interest in women in Irish nationalism - see her Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1984) - results in detailed coverage of Maud Gonne's involvement with women's groups. The biography is very well illustrated and includes a photo­ graph of the adolescent Iseult which makes the basis of Yeats's infatuation clear. The political and biographical coverage of the earlier part of Maud Gonne's life is not particularly good. Given Margaret Ward's training as a historian, it is regrettable that she presents material from both A Servant of the Queen and Autobiographies without verification. Both are vital but slippery works. Where Yeats's account of his own political career is distorted, self-serving or confused, she follows it without question. I will examine a group of misapprehensions to illustrate the problem. After the debacle of the New Irish Library, Ward states, "Yeats ... did not return to Irish political life tilll897". But Yeats was elected President of the London Young Ireland Society (a front for the Irish National Alliance and Irish Republican Brotherhood) in December 1896: he did not achieve such an important position by staying out of politics. Worse follows. With naivete unusual in a political historian she takes as valid Yeats's account in Autobiographies of his involvement with the '98 Centennial Movement. He presents himself as having in spring 1897 involved himself with the movement merely as a chivalrous gesture of support to Maud Gonne. In 1923, perhaps, Yeats wished to see it this way. However, he had become President of the Provisional "'98 Celebration Committee" for Great Britain ex officio (as Presi­ dent of the Young Ireland Society) on 16 February 1897. By April 1897 he had 336 D. Toomey (ed.), Yeats and Women © Deirdre Toomey 1992 Margaret Ward; Margery Brady 337 been to Dublin (with Frank Hugh O'Donnell) to represent Great Britain at the first large '98 meeting on 4 March, had been involved in the first major quarrel in the movement and had found himself unwittingly assisting in the creation of O'Donnell's imaginary secret society Fuath Na Gall. On 3 April Yeats had chaired an important '98 meeting in London at which O'Donnell caused more trouble by misreporting events at the Dublin meeting. None of these activities was pursued on Maud Gonne's account. The Autobiographies version of events is a subjective reconstruction. Memoirs is much closer to the truth. All this material is in the public domain, reported unremittingly week by week in United Ireland. The accpunt of Maud Gonne's early association withJames Connolly, a very important matter central to our conception of her broader political alliances, is erroneous, because derived without demur from Memoirs and Autobiographies. Yeats chose to present himself as intervening in June 1897 to persuade Maud Gonne to speak on behalf of Connolly's Irish Socialist Republican Party: "she was not a socialist" (Mem 112). The implication in both ofYeats's accounts is that she barely knew Connolly and was unsympathetic to his politics. A copy of the minutes of the ISRP is in the National Library of Ireland and this record tells another story. The party had received a letter from Maud Gonne on 10 December 1896 expressing interest in the movement, and on 7 January 1897 she had written again expressing full accord with the socialist cause. Yeats wished in this matter to privilege his own first encounter with Connolly and diminish Maud Gonne's well-established ties with Connolly and the ISRP. Again, Ward's account of the Jubilee Riots is derived from Memoirs not from the nationalist press. Why? The Irish Daily Independent reports at length a powerful speech by Maud Gonne on 21 June outside Trinity College, Dublin, which gives adequate evidence of her skill as a public speaker. Yeats was present passively as her escort. He did not speak. The riots were exhaustively reported by the Irish Daily Independent, yet again Ward depends on Yeats's account. On p. 48 ofher book Ward quotes Yeats's spurious memory of a trip to Scotland in late 1897. He and Maud Gonne certainly went to Manchester and environs in October, to ensure inter alia the solidarity of the Midlands societies with the London '98 executive. Maud Gonne went from Manchester to London and thence to Dublin for a meeting, then sailed to America. Not only is there no evidence of a trip to Scotland, but there was no time to fit it in. On p. 49 confusion increases. On the sole evidence of an unverified para­ graph in a letter to Russell, Yeats and Maud are described as being in the west oflreland in January 1898, engaged in mystical investigations. Yeats had hoped to do this, but instead spent the period in London. More irritating is the absence of a coherent account of Maud Gonne's speech on 9 January at Castle bar, where according to the police she addressed a crowd of about 7,500 ( 10,000 according to the nationalist press). The Shan Van Vocht, the Belfast 338 Yeats Annual No. 9 radical journal, gives an important report of this meeting, with a fully mythol­ ogised account of Maud Gonne in a dialogue between two "country folk": "Columbkilla's prophecy is comin' thrue at lasht." "How do you mane?" "He said Ireland would be free by a woman, and he was never wrong yet." "Thrue, but wasn't it a red-haired woman he sed?" "Yis ... But what kind ov a colour is it they call auburn, too?" The woman of the Sidhe indeed. Ward gives no account of the Irish Nationalist Association squabbles over the money that Maud Gonne had raised in America, nor of her important political meeting in Liverpool in February (again, reported in United Ireland). She offers a rather loose account of the famine in Ballina: she does not reproduce the pamphlet which Maud Gonne and Connolly wrote and distributed at this time, although a full text is available. Nor does she trace the powerful articles on the famine which Maud Gonne published in the Dublin papers in early March. Again, these articles give a sense of what an able political journalist she was. The account of the actual '98 celebrations is very sketchy, despite the acres of newsprint which the nationalist press devoted to them. Maud Gonne insists in A Servant of the Queen that she refused to stand (with about a hundred others) on the platform at the final ceremony in Stephen's Green. The papers report her as being there. Perhaps this was a post-Free St;ate rewriting of history on her part. More use of the material in public records on her activities would have been useful. I have read one delightful police report in which a humble Dublin plod follows Maud Gonne and Yeats but finds that they are simply "talking about literature". Another policeman had the task offollowing MacBride from bar to bar on his return to Dublin - an exhausting experience. When the biography moves to the Boer War, Ward's political reporting is much more secure, largely dependent on the United Irishman; but there are strange lapses. She does not identify the renegade informer of 1900 as Frank Hugh O'Donnell, although Yeats makes his identity clear in Memoirs (and in letters to Lady Gregory). When Ward turns to a discussion of Maud Gonne's part in establishing and promoting Irish women's political and cultural organ­ isations, her work is excellent. Here she is able to draw on oral testimony which she has collected, all fascinating. As nearly all of Ward's informants were women who had worked with Maud Gonne, we see her through female eyes, a refreshing change from infatuated male tributes. She offers a substantial analysis of Maud Gonne's post-1916 and post-1921 political stances. Her interview with Maire Comerford produces a shrewd and objective assessment of Maud Gonne's oblique relation to republicanism: "a person more of reac- Margaret Ward; Margery Brady 339 tions, resenting injustice, going where places were burnt, where the military burnt towns, that kind of thing- she followed them as a protester". "Dark Tomb-haunter" indeed. I would have welcomed a fuller account of Maud Gonne:s attitude to fascism and the Second World War. Ward initiates a what seems to be a promising discussion, which tails off in a few pages. She correctly points to a marked element of pro-German feeling in Ireland during the war, not by any means confined to radical nationalist circles, but she could have expanded this discussion- reminding her readers of, say, de Valera's visit of condolence to the German Legation on the death of Hitler. To those remote from Ireland this act must embody an extraordinary combination of priggishness and callous­ ness, given that it came in the wake of full news of the death camps. However, many Irish people must have clung to the stance of moral and spiritual superiority that they had taken during the war. Ward gestures to the anti­ semitic sentiments which Maud Gonne would have absorbed from Boulangist circles, but fails to examine the existence of identical sentiments in Irish nationalist circles.
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