Abstract
Why do you choose to suffer? You find your subject, you wear out your wits over it with toiling at night, you throw your very life into it; and after all your journeyings into the field of thought, the monument reared with your life-blood is simply a good or a bad speculation for a publisher. Your work will sell or it will not sell; and therein, for them, lies the whole question. A book means so much capital at risk, and the better the book the less likely it is to sell. A man of talent rises above the level of ordinary heads; his success varies in direct ratio with the time required for his work to be appreciated. And no publisher wants to wait. Today’s book must be sold by to-morrow. Acting on this system, publishers and booksellers do not care to take real literature, books that call for the high praise that comes slowly.
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Notes
Honoré de Balzac, A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, trans. Ellen Marriage (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 144.
W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 315; Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 162, 187.
W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus and Michael J. Sidnell (London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1992; hereafter cited as VSR), Appendix 5: ‘The Illustrations and Cover Designs’, pp. 271–86.
William H. O’Donnell as The Speckled Bird with Variant Versions (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976) (hereafter SB).
Paul Morgan, Frank Sidgwick’s Diary and Other Material Relating to The Shakespeare Head Press at Stratford-Upon-Avon (Oxford: published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 63n.
James G. Nelson’s Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 19 n. 35.
Warwick Gould, ‘“The Music of Heaven”: Dorothea Hunter’ in Deirdre Toomey (ed.), Yeats and Women: Yeats Annual No. 9 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 132–88, at pp. 158–62; and George Mills Harper, Yeats Golden Dawn (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 27–31.
Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan 1843–1943 (London: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 220–1.
M. Morris, Hunting (London: Longmans, 1885); The First Afghan War (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Seale & Rivington, 1878); Essays in Theatrical Criticism (London: Remington, 1882); Claverhouse, for Andrew Lang’s ‘English Worthies’ series (London: Longmans, 1887); Montrose, for the ‘English Men of Action’ series (London: Macmillan, 1892) and Tales of the Spanish Main (London: Macmillan, 1901).
M. Morris, Poet’s Walk (London, Macmillan, new and rev. edn, 1898).
Robert Ackerman’s J. G. Frazer, His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 95–6.
C. George Sandulescu (ed.), Rediscovering Wilde (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), pp. 167–92, at pp. 183–5.
Roy Foster’s title essay in his Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1993), pp. 171–94.
W. B. Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft: Journal transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973; hereafter Mem), p. 116; and Maud Gonne’s own account in A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences (London: Gollancz, 1938; hereafter SQ), pp. 303–8.
Hugh Oram, The Newspaper Book: A History of Newspapers in Ireland, 1649–1983 (Dublin: MO Books, 1983), p. 94.
MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (eds), The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938: Always Your Friend (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 122 and n. 1.
Alan B. Himber (eds), Letters to W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1977), 2 vols, p. 154.
Toshi Furomoto (ed.), A Widening Gyre – Poems on W.B. Yeats (Nishinomiya, Japan: privately printed, 1990), pp. 90–2).
D. A. Hamer, John Morley, Liberal Intellectual (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).
Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 167–8.
Dan H. Laurence (ed.), The Collected Letters of George Bernard Shaw (1874–1897) (London: Max Reinhardt, 1965; hereafter Shaw, Letters), passim.
John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 48.
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. I,1856–1898: The Search for Love (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), passim and pp. 79–80.
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© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Gould, W. (1996). ‘Playing at Treason with Miss Maud Gonne’: Yeats and his Publishers in 1900. In: Willison, I., Gould, W., Chernaik, W. (eds) Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24551-2_2
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