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Article: Out from Willie's shadow
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- March 9, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Lily and Lolly sounds like a music-hall duo, but in fact the
lives of WB Yeats's sisters, Susan and Elizabeth, weren't
especially abundant in gaiety. They were the dogsbodies of the
Yeats family; indeed at one point, as their biographer is at pains
to stress, it was only the income they supplied that kept things
going.
The story of their father's improvidence is pretty well-known:
how he abandoned the Bar for a career in portrait-painting, and
shunted his family back and forth between Dublin and London, as
each of these settings appeared more auspicious to him when he was
out of it, while his wife (born Susan Pollexfen) withdrew
increasingly into her own discontent. Of her four children, ...