Books, Arts & Manners: Fairies and Peahens

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume I, 1865-1895, edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford, 548 pp., $29.95)

In their lively introduction, the editors convincingly state that Yeats’s letters “offer an insight into a private self that was often hidden in public; they illuminate his literary development; and they chart the ways in which the larger intellectual, political, and social forces of his age helped to mold his consciousness and his creativity.” The editors have found seven thousand Yeats letters, of which 350 (half published for the first time) appear in this volume, the first of 12. The excellent and exhaustive notes (about one-third of the text) and useful forty-page biographical and historical appendix compensate for the lack of a full-scale biography. The editors have also taken great care to reproduce Yeats’s atrocious spelling and punctuation.

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume I, 1865-1895, edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford, 548 pp., $29.95)

In their lively introduction, the editors convincingly state that Yeats’s letters “offer an insight into a private self that was often hidden in public; they illuminate his literary development; and they chart the ways in which the larger intellectual, political, and social forces of his age helped to mold his consciousness and his creativity.” The editors have found seven thousand Yeats letters, of which 350 (half published for the first time) appear in this volume, the first of 12. The excellent and exhaustive notes (about one-third of the text) and useful forty-page biographical and historical appendix compensate for the lack of a full-scale biography. The editors have also taken great care to reproduce Yeats’s atrocious spelling and punctuation.