Free New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Tóibín

Pounds increased the breadth of her reading as well as offering her, and indeed her mother, an example of how someone with her unusual mixture of cleverness, earnestness and independence of mind might marry.
    In this world of esoteric reading, leisured mysticism, visiting lecturers and poets making it new, Yeats had iconic status.

    George’s mother knew him: her second husband’s sister was Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy’s mother, with whom Yeats had had an affair and remained on good terms. George met Yeats in 1911. She remembered vividly that she saw him and recognized him one morning in the British Museum, and later that same day while he was taking tea with her mother at Olivia Shakespear’s she was introduced to him. He was three years older than her mother and the same age as her father, who had been dead for two years, would have been. Over the next while, as George’s mother and her circle sojourned outside London, they were joined by the poet on a number of occasions. In February 1912 Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I am at Margate with a Mr and Mrs Tucker (she was a Mrs Hyde-Lees who I have known vaguely for years). I got rather out of sorts, digestion wrong & so on & wanted to do nothing for a day or two … This is a dismal place & it rains all day but it is very quiet & a good change & I am with pleasant people & out of the Dublin atmosphere.’
    Yeats was responsible for the induction with great ceremony and solemnity of George Hyde-Lees into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a sort of Masonic Lodge for those interested in the occult, in July 1914. Here once again her dutiful, serious-minded, studious self emerged as she made her way through the Order’s elaborate stages, arriving at the same level as Yeats by 1917. In these years, as the war intensified, she worked as a parttime volunteer orderly and nurse in London while continuing her reading and visits to the British Museum. At the end of February 1917 she and Yeats went together to a séance; it seems that the following month he discussed with her the possibility of marriage. He did not then formally propose, but instead left her waiting while he dallied with Maud Gonne and her daughter.
    When he did propose, six months later, she accepted him. He described himself as ‘a Sinbad who after many misadventures has at last found port’, but in the days that followed explained hisplans for a continuing familiarity not only with Maud Gonne but with her daughter Iseult. He made this clear to his betrothed and, in turn, to her mother. Her mother wrote in alarm to Lady Gregory, the person who she knew could most influence Yeats, and one of the few who was already aware of the engagement: ‘I now find this engagement is based on a series of misconceptions so incredible that only the context can prove them to be misconceptions.’ Her daughter, she wrote, believed that the poet had wanted to marry her for some time, but the mother’s own impression now was that, instead, ‘the idea occurred to him that as he wanted to marry, she might do’. George, she wrote,
    is under the glamour of a great man thirty years older than herself & with a talent for love-making. But she has a strong and vivid character and I can honestly assure you that nothing could be worse for her than to be married in this manner … If Georgie had an inkling of the real state of affairs she would never consent to see him again; if she realized it after her marriage she would leave him at once.
    Having interrogated the poet, who had come to Coole, Lady Gregory, in a letter that is now lost, seems to have tried to reassure the mother. She wrote also to George, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle that Yeats had bought a year earlier. George, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats:
    I find her graceful & beautiful, & in her bright picturesque dresses, she