A friend of mine recently wrote something about Maud Gonne, a woman I never had heard of before. She was the woman who Yeats wrote all his poetry for, not his wife. He proposed to her, and she refused, but she also is the person who dragged him into Irish nationalism as a movement.
It's intersting to hear about what inspired a great writer and who influenced them. I wonder about the full interacion between the two of them, the interwoven notes of expression and correspondence.
And I found some of the
background on her interesting, for example the irish nationalism stuff. She apparently did not have a happy marriage when she finally did marry and ultimately divorced.
It's interesting to note the stuff I did and did NOT learn in school. We never covered the French Revolution, but skipped it in favor of jumping into industrialization, and then skipped more to go to WWI. I know scads about the Revolutionary War and the Civil war, but little about the War of 1812 and there are large reams of Great Britian's history I just don't know. I know a good deal about Russia, but little about Ireland that I didn't pick up on my own. Even the folklore I know seems to be non-standard (Norse and Russian more than Celtic/British Isles as most of my friends seem to know). Can anyone recommend a good source for that matter on Folk lore?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
