←Menu of Letters 1899

Aet. 47, to an Irish woman of letters. This letter begins with mention of a new project, the play Diarmuid and Grania by George Moore and W. B. Yeats.

According to George, the collaboration began in the autumn of 1899 much to the dismay of Lady Gregory who regretted “a man of genius and a man of talent coming together” (Hail and Farewell! Ave, Chapter 10). Yeats recalled George at close working quarters in Dramatis Personae (1936), Sections 17-25. His contemporary recollections may be found in Letters of W. B. Yeats (1954), edited by Alan Wade.

Most of this letter concerns continuing editorial work on Edward Martyn’s play The Tale of a Town, which evolved into George’s play The Bending of the Bough with Yeats’s assistance. The letter names several characters.

Yeats’s symbolist verse play The Shadowy Waters was published in spring 1900 and staged in 1904. In Hail and Farewell! Ave, Chapter 9, George claimed that he helped Yeats revise The Shadowy Waters at Tullyra and Coole in the early autumn of 1899. He remembered Yeats as “a tall black figure standing at the edge of the lake, wearing a cloak which fell in straight folds to his knees, looking like a great umbrella forgotten by some picnic party,” his rushing mind like “a wheel lifted from the ground.”