Table of Contents

List of Illustrations; Family Tree; Introduction; Prelude - Ballylee, August 1923; I. PROGRESSIONS 1892-1918; 1. Ancestry; 2. Childhood; 3. Friends; 4. Studies; 5. The Golden Dawn; 6. Forest Row; 7. London, Oxford, and Dublin; II. CONJUNCTIONS 1919-1921; 8. Coole; 9. Anne; 10. Oxford and New York; 11. Michael; III. DIRECTIONS 1922-1928; 12. Ballylee; 13. Merrion Square; 14. Dublin; IV. TRANSITS 1929-1939; 15. Rapallo; 16. Fitzwilliam Square; 17. Riversdale; 18. Majorca; 19. Menton; V. MAPPING; 20. Palmerston Road; 21. Seekers and Friends; 22. Postlude: Odysseys; The Death of William Gilbert Hyde Lees; Abbreviations; Notes; Index

About the Author

Ann Saddlemyer is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. She is one of the General Editors of the Cornell Yeats series (publishing the MSS of the entire Yeats canon); and on the editorial boards of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, the Irish Studies Review, the Irish University Review, the Correspondence of Bernard Shaw, and the Shaw Annual; and co-founder of the journal Theatre Research in Canada. She was awarded the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Award for Criticism for her Collected Letters of John Millington Synge (OUP).

Reviews

Magnificently authoritative ... Becoming George is a thoroughly enjoyable though highly demanding read ... The magnificent achievement of this biography is the way basic research and informed psychological speculation reinforce one another to dramatically image the life of George Yeats ... we will be perpetually in Saddlemyer's debt for recounting that story of what actually happened in such illuminating and engaging detail. Irish Studies Review Ann Saddlemyer has written a profound, exhaustive, and richly evocative life of this truly remarkable woman. John Banville, New York Review of Books Superbly attentive book ... [The] "Prelude" is a taster for how Saddlemyer's closely worked text will follow her subject's life in eliciting subtle integrity from often chaotic multiplicity ... Saddlemyer does evoke the everyday, amusing, gossipy Yeats. Edna Longley, Times Literary Supplement This powerful and illuminating biography provides a feast for Yeats scholars. Carole Seymour-Jones, Literary Review [In her] wise, majestic biography, Ann Saddlemyer seems to see all and understand all; her book is a masterpiece, an extraordinary achievement. Kildare Dobbs, Toronto Globe and Mail A quarry for future Yeats scholars ... unputdownable. P.J.Kavanagh, Spectator This fine biography ... is full of reminiscences straight from George's mouth ... To know Willy [W.B.Yeats] we must understand George; we now can, thanks to this becoming book. Peter van de Kamp, Sunday Independent, Dublin