Abstract
This fragment, first published posthumously in the Dublin Magazine in January 1938, is from a draft of George William Russell’s unfinished autobiography, The Sunset of Fantasy. By the time Russell [AE] began his book, literary Dublin was widely known through the reminiscences of Moore, Katharine Tynan, and W. B. Yeats, and through Ulysses. Of these, Moore’s Hail and Farewell, which was published in three volumes between 1911 and 1914, was initially the most influential. It not only generated widespread interest in the life and literature of Dublin, but it also challenged Irish writers to experiment with self-portraiture. Moore’s trilogy skilfully counterpoints autobiography and history. In the guise of deliberating about himself and his friends and acquaintances, or those of them at least who were eminent in Irish affairs, he created the illusion that he was giving a full account of contemporary Ireland.
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Notes
See Richard Cave (ed.), George Moore, Hail and Farewell (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976) pp. 581–2.
Russell, review of Katharine Tynan, Twenty-Jive Years: Reminiscences, in Henry Summerfield (ed.), Selections from Contributions to the Irish Homestead by G. W. Russell — A. E., 2 vols (Gcrrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978) II, 884. Hereafter cited as Summerfield (ed.), Homestead.
Alan Denson (ed.), Letters from AE (London: Abelard Schuman, 1961) pp. 109–10, to George Moore, [6 April 1916]. Hereafter cited as Denson (ed.), Letters.
AE, “On the Character in Irish Literature”, foreword to Frank O’Connor, The Wild Bird’s Nest: Poems Translated from the Irish (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).
See Peter Kuch, “A Few Twigs from The Wild Bird’s Nest”, in A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Yeats the European (Gcrrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989) pp. 101–18.
Maybe an unconscious allusion to Edmund Gumey, Frederick W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore’s Phantasms of the Living (London: Society for Psychical Research, 1886).
Russell seems to have first met Little, an eccentric Catholic mystic and poet, some time in the early eighties and to have kept in touch with him until the mid-twenties. Much of the above is derived from his article, “Philip Francis Little”, The Irish Statesman, 18 December 1926, pp. 355–6, partly reprinted in Monk Gibbon (ed.), The Living Torch (London: Macmillan, 1937) pp. 154–8.
Russell also used the same material in his “Address to the Thirtieth Annual Dinner of the American-Irish Historical Society”, delivered 28 January 1928, and published in the Journal of the American-Irish Historical Society (New York) XXVII, pp. 368–80.
Russell wrote about his work in “The Art of John Hughes”, New Ireland Review, X (Dublin, November 1898) pp. 162–5;
reprinted in the Journal and Proceedings of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland, 1 (Dublin, 1901) pp. 243–8.
For a discussion of the poems and articles Yeats wrote about the encounter, see Peter Kuch, Yeats and AE: “the antagonism that unites dear friends” (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1986) pp. 64–8.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Kuch, P. (1993). “The Sunset of Fantasy” by AE. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 10. Yeats Annual. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11916-5_8
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