Iseult Gonne was the daughter of Maud Gonne

Maud Gonne

Maud Gonne MacBride was an English-born Irish revolutionary, feminist and actress, best remembered for her turbulent relationship with William Butler Yeats. Of Anglo-Irish stock and birth, she was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of evicted people in the Land Wars...

 and Lucien Millevoye

Lucien Millevoye

Lucien Millevoye was a French journalist and right-wing politician, now best known for his relationship with the Irish revolutionary and muse of W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne....

, and the wife of the novelist Francis Stuart

Francis Stuart

Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart was an Irish writer. His novels have been described as having a thrusting modernist iconoclasm. Awarded the highest artistic accolade in Ireland before his death in 2000, his unwillingness to take a clear moral stance with regard to his years spent in Nazi...

.

Iseult was born on August 6, 1894, the illegitimate daughter of Maud and her then married French Boulangist lover Lucien Millevoye. She was conceived in the mausoleum

Mausoleum

A mausoleum is an external free-standing building constructed as a monument enclosing the interment space or burial chamber of a deceased person or persons. A monument without the interment is a cenotaph. A mausoleum may be considered a type of tomb or the tomb may be considered to be within the...

 of her late brother in an attempt by her parents to reincarnate their dead and still adored infant. She was educated at a Carmelite convent in Laval

Laval, Mayenne

Laval is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France.It lies on the threshold of Brittany and on the border between Normandy and Anjou. Its citizens are called Lavallois.-Geography:...

, France; when she returned to Ireland she was referred to in public as Maud's niece rather than daughter.

Iseult was widely considered a great beauty, but temperate and able to speak her mind. She attracted the admiration of literary figures including Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Lennox Robinson

Lennox Robinson

Esmé Stuart Lennox Robinson was an Irish dramatist, poet and theatre producer and director who was involved with the Abbey Theatre....

 and Liam O'Flaherty

Liam O'Flaherty

Liam O'Flaherty was a significant Irish novelist and short story writer and a major figure in the Irish literary renaissance, born August 28, 1896, died September 7, 1984.-Biography:...

. Her most famous association was with William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

, who had long been in love with her mother. In 1916, while in his fifties, Yeats wooed and proposed to the teenage Iseult. Although she refused, he became the closest she would have to a father figure. Her relationship with her stepfather John MacBride

John MacBride

Major John MacBride was an Irish republican executed for participation in the 1916 Easter Rising.-Early life:...

 had long been tainted due to rumours of abuse on his part. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory in January 1905, the month MacBride and Maud separated, that he had been told MacBride had molested Iseult, who at that time was going on 11 years old.

In 1920, she eloped to London with the Irish-Australian writer, Francis Stuart. Under duress from both their parents, the couple later married. Their first child, Dolores, died in 1921 of spinal meningitis while three months old. The couple had two other children, Ian and Catherine.

Iseult avoided the notoriety enjoyed by her mother by occupying herself with child-rearing and house-keeping. However she made headlines during the Second World War when she was brought to trial for harboring a German parachutist, a crime to which she confessed but was acquitted.

Sources

• R. F., Foster. W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. New York: Oxford UP
  Oxford University Press
  Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
  
  , 1997. 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 1403921342, ISBN 978-1403921345

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.