1421) Georgie Hyde-Lees

Georgie Hyde-Lees (born Bertha Hyde-Lees, 1892 – 1968). Wife of the poet William Butler Yeats.

In 1917, when she was 25 and Yeats 52, he asked Georgie to marry him. Only a few weeks earlier Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud Gonne whom Yeats had loved for many years, had rejected Yeats' marriage proposal. Georgie and Yeats married just three weeks later, on 20 October, in a public registry office, witnessed by her mother and Ezra Pound. During the honeymoon, while Yeats was still brooding about Iseult's rejection, Georgie began the automatic writing which fascinated him. Yeats wrote about her psychography days later in what was to be A Vision, and it held the marriage together for many years. Within a year of marriage Yeats declared her name of Georgie to be insufferable, and henceforth called her George.

The couple had two children, Anne and Michael.

 

- "... her colour ruddy and her hair reddish brown..." https://www.theguardian.com/.../26/poetry.highereducation

 

- "Red-brown hair and a high colour..." https://books.google.it/books?id=z2MSBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA65...

 

- "... the painting reveals her beautiful glossy auburn hair..." https://books.google.it/books?id=hPTKdUNVXhcC&pg=PA115...

 

- "As she talked, there was the glint of high intelligence in her eyes and a lovely gleam in her red-brown hair." https://books.google.it/books?id=3V0oDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT139...