For almost two decades, on and off, I’ve been writing about Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats, this couple who were separated by passion and politics, yet who remain forever coupled in the imagination of countless readers.

First came A Dance in Time (Penguin, 2008), now mercifully out of print. That book misfired and I blamed my publisher, who had encouraged me put two books together to keep to a present-and-past formula that had made my first novel a bestseller. It was an uneasy mix and our creative differences eventually led me to reclaim all my rights.

I then issued Her Secret Rose under my own imprint (Font Publications, 2014). The reviews were generous and the book won a prestigious award, but I still felt unsatisfied. This time I could only blame myself. I moved on to other projects and tried to wave away the narrator, Rosy Cross, as she whispered new plot lines in my ear. I'd scribble them down, just in case, and sometimes get pulled into making a scene here and a chapter there, but mostly I got on with other things.

Then one day I looked up from Rosy's notes and draft, realising that I had a novel series on my hands, and set to writing it. (One of the many joys about being an indie author is the freedom to indulge such excess.) The first of those books, A Life Before, is almost finalised and will be set for publication soon.

As a novelist, I believe story is the best way to capture complexity. Telling the Gonne-Yeats saga demanded a large fictional canvas, and all the tricks of the novelist’s trade, to capture its many dimensions and kaleidoscopic glory. The last thing I expected was that I would find that the finalised fiction, for all its imaginative power, still wasn't quite saying all. And that (eek!) I’d find myself with a non-fiction book on a related subject popping up first.

But that's what happened and now it's almost done. A Crowd of Stars: W.B.Yeats's poetry to Maud Gonne with Commentary by the Muse.

Surprisingly, it's the only full collection of Yeats poems to Gonne. And certainly the only book that allows the muse to ‘write back' in her own words.

Why? When I'd written so much already on this topic, what made this book necessary? While I was writing it, I had no idea. It just felt like a rush of blood to the head. Now I've got it all down, I can see that it was to make explicit (to myself as much as anyone) the ideas, absences, and assumptions the novels necessarily absorbed, or leapt over.

Fiction must leap and nonfiction must explain.

A Crowd of Stars: Answering Questions

Questions this book sets out to answer include: How does our reading of a love-poem change when we understand its emotional cost? Why has the Gonne–Yeats story so gripped my own imagination? And how can contemporary disciplines—trauma studies, creativity research, feminist reclamation—illuminate our readings of lives and works?

To write this book, I needed to immerse myself again in these charged poetic messages that Yeats composed and revised over decades in the light and shadow of Gonne's character, as well as other primary materials like letters, speeches, manifestos and memoirs. As I looked clearly and critically at the evidence through a non-fiction rather than fictional lens, interpreting historical and biographical ‘facts’ in ways that go against the accepted grain, I got new answers about these two monumental people and their works.

My aim has been to restore the creative collaboration they enjoyed, as friends and lovers, and the complexity of their relationship, which was flattened by Yeats into the mono-myth of his unrequited love for Gonne.

Feminist studies are often accused of bias—as if traditional scholarship were somehow neutral, as if interpretation does not inherently carry perspective, but of course all feminisms are attempts to heal and rebalance.

In a world suffering deep harm from inherited hierarchies, attending to enforced, internalised silences, confronting the power structures that shape what we see and say, feels like necessary, urgent work.

So fiction soon, I promise. But this nonfiction offering will launch first.