The Fascination of What’s Difficult: Lively but flawed Maud Gonne biography attempts to escape Yeats’s shadow
Kim Bendheim argues that Maud Gonne was much more than just a muse to one of Ireland’s greatest poets and highlights her roles as ‘a fiery patriot, a political prisoner, a mother and a clever, wealthy woman’
BIOGRAPHY
The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne
By Kim Bendheim
OR Books, €18.45
Maud Gonne had no illusions about how she would be treated by history. “Of all my work and all my effort, little will remain,” she gloomily predicted in a 1910 letter to WB Yeats, the pining poet who unsuccessfully proposed to her at least four times.
“What you have written for me will live because our love has ...
