Catherine E. Paul & Margaret Mills, editors
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume XIII,
A Vision; The Original 1925 Version.
Scribner, 384 pages, $60

Sometime in 1911—the exact date is not known—W. B. Yeats, visiting his friend Olivia Shakespear in London, was introduced to a young Englishwoman named Bertha Georgiana Hyde-Lees. She was a few months over eighteen, he was nearly forty-six. A friendship soon developed, enthusiastic on her part, warier on his. They shared many occult interests, including astrology, the Tarot, magic, spiritualism, and esoteric philosophy. She was also of a good family. Over the months, they attended séances together. The relation proceeded, but not in haste. Yeats and Mrs. Shakespear had recently renewed their old intimacy, and he was also entangled in an affair with Mabel Dickinson. On July 24, 1914 Georgie—as Yeats liked to call her, though most of her friends called her George—was inducted, with Yeats as sponsor, into the Stella Matutina Section of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society devoted to occult “science” and magic. In November 1915 and for a few months thereafter, there was talk of marriage, but it seems to have been notional on Yeats’s part, even though George started thinking of herself as engaged to him.

Yeats was still enchanted with the ardent Nationalist Maud Gonne—English daughter of a British Army officer of Irish background—although she had desecrated the poet’s love in 1903 by marrying the warrior-patriot John MacBride, despite Yeats’s several