Iseult Gonne
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Iseult Gonne (1894 – 1954), was the daughter of Maud Gonne and Lucien Millevoye, and the wife of the novelist Francis Stuart.[1]
Born on August 6, 1894, Iseult was the illegitimate daughter of Maud Gonne by her married French anarchist lover Lucien Millevoye. She was conceived in the mausoleum of her short-lived brother, in an attempt to reincarnate the dead infant. Educated at a Carmelite convent in Laval, France, when she returned to Ireland, she was referred to in public as Maud Gonne's niece rather than as her daughter. This was due to the conservative nature of Irish society at the time.
Iseult Gonne was widely considered a great beauty, attracting the admiration of such literary figures as Ezra Pound, Arthur Symms, Lennox Robinson, and Liam O'Flaherty. Possibly her most famous association, however, was with William Butler Yeats. Yeats had long been in love with her mother; then in his fifties, he proposed to the much younger Iseult in 1916. Though she refused, he would remain the closest she had to a father figure. Her relationship with her real step-father, John MacBride, had long been tainted due to rumours of possible abuse on his part.[2]
In 1920, she eloped to London with the Irish-Australian writer, Francis Stuart. Under duress from both their parents, she later married him. Their first child, a daughter called Dolores, died of spinal meningitis in 1921 at the age of three months. They would have two more children, Ian and Catherine. She mostly avoided the kind of notoriety her mother had enjoyed for the rest of her life, occupied with child-rearing and house-keeping, though she would once more hit the headlines during the Second World War when she went on trial for harboring a German parachutist, a crime of which she was acquitted and to which she confessed.
She passed away in March of 1954 from heart disease, at the age of fifty-nine.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Bolger, Dermot. "A life less ordinary: The tale of Maud Gonne's daughter". The Sunday Business Post, 26 December 2004. Retrieved on 20 June 2007.
- ^ Amanda French, "A Strangely Useless Thing: Iseult Gonne and Yeats," Yeats Eliot Review: A Journal of Criticism and Scholarship 19:2 (2002): 13-24
[edit] Sources
- Foster, R. F. (1997). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-288085-3.
- Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne: A Girl That Knew All Dante Once; Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; ISBN-10: 1403921342, ISBN-13: 978-1403921345
[edit] External links
- Amanda French, "A Strangely Useless Thing: Iseult Gonne and Yeats," Yeats Eliot Review: A Journal of Criticism and Scholarship 19:2 (2002): 13-24.
