This weekend at Thoor Ballylee, columnist and author Anthony J. Jordan gives us his views on an interesting and controversial topic.

Maud Gonne’s Men

Anthony J. Jordan

Thoor Ballylee

3pm Saturday 13th July 2019

Biographer of Arthur Griffith, W.T. Cosgrave and Sean MacBride, Anthony J. Jordan is a native of Ballyhuinis, Co. Mayo, educated at NUI Maynooth, UCD, and St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. He has wide interests in Irish culture and politics, and in particular the complicated repatriation of the bodies of Irish writers like W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.

His talk this weekend delves into the thorny thickets of Maud Gonne’s life, loves, and nationalist activities following his own book on the topic (see above). Gonne’s long affair with the right-wing French nationalist Lucien Millevoye produced two children, one who would die tragically young, and an agreement to take on the British Empire in any form. This entanglement overlapped with her spiritual marriage with W.B. Yeats, and prefigured a disastrous marriage with the revolutionary John MacBride which ended with abuse allegations and a fraught separation case. Even then after his execution in 1916 she wore black in honour of a man who Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ says he ‘dreamed / A drunken vainglorious lout’. Amid renewed interest in the subject stimulated by new work such as Adrian Frazier’s The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W.B. Yeats (Lilliput, 2016), Anthony J. Jordan gives us his considered opinion and answers questions.

Join us for an engrossing talk, a cup of tea, and a unique view of Yeats’s tower.