YEATS, William Butler (1865-1939). Autograph letter signed to Florence Farr ('Florence Emery'), 18 Woburn Buildings, 5 March n.y. [1917], including in the text a small sketch of a tower in pen and ink, 8 pages, 8°, autograph envelope addressed to Mrs Emery in Ceylon (readdressed to her in hospital in Colombo, in a different hand). Provenance: Florence Farr (d. 1917); her sister  Henrietta (Mrs H.M. Paget), and by descent.
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YEATS, William Butler (1865-1939). Autograph letter signed to Florence Farr ('Florence Emery'), 18 Woburn Buildings, 5 March n.y. [1917], including in the text a small sketch of a tower in pen and ink, 8 pages, 8°, autograph envelope addressed to Mrs Emery in Ceylon (readdressed to her in hospital in Colombo, in a different hand). Provenance: Florence Farr (d. 1917); her sister Henrietta (Mrs H.M. Paget), and by descent.

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YEATS, William Butler (1865-1939). Autograph letter signed to Florence Farr ('Florence Emery'), 18 Woburn Buildings, 5 March n.y. [1917], including in the text a small sketch of a tower in pen and ink, 8 pages, 8°, autograph envelope addressed to Mrs Emery in Ceylon (readdressed to her in hospital in Colombo, in a different hand). Provenance: Florence Farr (d. 1917); her sister Henrietta (Mrs H.M. Paget), and by descent.

A warm and chatty letter to his former mistress, describing the 'roofless tower in Ireland' to which Yeats plans to withdraw. 'The old castles are the only dignified buildings left in Ireland & as this one has its winding stair perfect and two of its stone floors it will not cost more than £200 or £300 to make habitable ... I am planning a stately old age when sheer curiosity will prevent the county from cutting me'. Among news of her friends, 'Shaw has been to the trenches and come back very subdued & silent but whether this is only to increase the value of certain essays which began this week in a morning paper I do not know. The government sending him at all has shocked the conventional'. He sees much of Ezra Pound and plans to read his 'Player Queen' to Mrs [Patrick] Campbell 'who says I have delayed it until her "jaw sags with age"'. He is writing on spiritualist and magical speculation, 'much of our old dreams and research & more of my new ones ... We "upon whom the pale moon gleams" should be always young but then if we were I should have to go & fight and that would be an interruption'.

Florence Farr, the actress daughter of Dr William Farr, the statistician and friend of Florence Nightingale, was a member of the circle of Yeats and his friends the Pagets in Bedford Park. She became the mistress of Shaw and then, after Shaw's failure to propose marriage following her divorce from her actor husband in 1894, turned to Yeats, who wrote the Land of Heart's Desire for her. While to Shaw she represented his ideal of the New Woman, Yeats appealed to her romantic side. He shared her interest in Eastern religions, magic and the occult and encouraged her in a chanting or 'cantillating' style of verse speaking. She collaborated with him in the Irish Literary Theatre, the 'New Art' and the 'Theatre of Beauty'. They drifted apart after 1900, and in 1912 she abandoned London and went to Ceylon where she died within a few weeks of the arrival of the present letter. The Norman tower depicted in the letter was at Ballylee in County Galway, close to Lady Gregory's Coole Park.
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