Orna Ross
A Life Before
£5.99
The story of Maud Gonne’s coming-of-age.
Who was Maud Gonne before she famously became ‘the troubling’ of W.B. Yeats life?
Born into privilege but betrayed by her inheritance, this English heiress has grown up in a world of military service and repeated displacement. Now, determined to live at full blaze, she meets the magnetic Lucien Millevoye and breaks every rule to follow his lead and find a useful role in life.
But challenging convention isn’t easy, not even for this most clever, beautiful, and gifted young woman. And when the meets the young poet, W. B. Yeats, whose poetic gaze cast her as symbol, she begins to count the cost of the life she has chosen.
Told in the magical voice of narrator Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’, and traversing Paris salons, London stages and the charged streets of 1880s Dublin, this true-life story of first love and first power is a portrait of an unforgettable woman at the crossroads of empire and independence.