Inside the Yeats Family Library

This extraordinary collection offers an intimate glimpse into the reading lives of one of Ireland’s most celebrated artistic families. If you’d like to browse the full list, see Collection Items: The Yeats Family Library.

A reader’s ticket is required to access our reading rooms. They are free and easy to obtain. 

It is the extant library of the Yeats family and includes many inscriptions, ownership marks, bookplates, and some annotations. There are 330 books in the collection, plus several volumes in duplicate. These were unsold items from The Dun Emer Press, The Cuala Press and The Dolmen Press. The Yeats sisters worked with Evelyn Gleeson at The Dun Emer Press in Dublin from 1902. They subsequently founded The Cuala Press after parting company with Gleeson in 1908. Lolly managed The Cuala Press and operated the printing press while Lily helped create works of art and craft. Both sisters had trained under William Morris & Co. in London. This publishing business was run by the Yeats family until the late 1940s.  The books published included works by WB Yeats and other writers associated with the Irish literary revival. They were designed, printed and published by the Yeats sisters. The Cuala business included other forms of art and craft, as well as printing, including embroidery.

In addition, there are sets of broadside ballads brought out monthly over several years in the first half of the twentieth century. They were an initiative of Jack B. Yeats. The initial broadsides were published by Elkin Mathews of London in 1902 and 1903 and then similar in smaller format by The Cuala Press during the first half of the twentieth century with many gaps in years. Illustrations in these were mainly by Jack Yeats and had ballads written out, some traditional and others contemporary, sometimes including a musical score. They were sold in shops, posted out, or collected by patrons every month for a year and were intended to be subscribed to as twelve-month sets, to provide entertainment and possibly wall decorations for subscribers. There are some unsold copies of Dolmen Press publications also. These were mainly of facsimiles from the 1970s of earlier Cuala Press publications, as there has always been great interest in The Cuala Press due to its associations with the Yeats family. Trinity College, Dublin holds the business archive of The Cuala Press. 

The Yeats Family Library belonged to John Butler Yeats and his wife, Susan (née Pollexfen), and their children, William Butler Yeats, Lily (Susan Mary), Lolly (Elizabeth Corbet), and Jack. It also included books belonging to their grandchildren, Michael and Anne Yeats. It was their great grandchildren who agreed that the National Library was the best home for the collection, and it was sold to the NLI in recent years.

Among the items catalogued were Susan Pollexfen Yeats’s collection of prizes for attending Sunday School and other accomplishments. She was the Yeats’s mother. She moved with her family between London and various addresses in Dublin and Sligo, where she had grown up. She later retired there under Ben Bulben, but she died in London while visiting her children there and is buried in Ealing.

She was a quiet, retiring person in later life at least, having suffered several strokes. Of all the people who owned books in this collection, I admire her the most.  She was married to John Butler Yeats, an artist of considerable skill. He worked as a book illustrator and a portrait painter but was unable to keep money in his pocket. Susan dressed in black, as many ladies did at the time. She was quite reserved and said little towards the end of her life. She had an illness which she bravely bore and had to accept and manage as best she could.

Mrs Yeats was dearly loved by her family, and there is a plaque in Saint John’s church in Sligo erected to her memory. The couple had four children who survived, all of them very talented: William (the poet), Jack (the artist), and daughters Lily (an embroiderer, general arts and crafts artist and creator of vestments and other church cloths), and Lolly, (an artist and printer, who wrote and illustrated a book on the painting of flowers). It was Lily who took care of the family library and regularly inscribed books to her niece and nephew, Anne and Michael, often giving information about which of their parents or grandparents had previously owned the books.

Photographs have been taken of all the inscriptions and sketches in the books that have them. The catalogue records include any inscriptions found on the books. The most complete record of any book is found under MARC on the catalogue. 

My favourite inscription is from Jack B. Yeats, the famous and prolific artist, who won the Olympic prize for sport when he submitted his painting of The Liffey Swim, an annual Dublin event that takes place to this day. On the flyleaf of Chambers Biographical Dictionary; the great of all nations and all times, he writes to his niece Susan (generally known as Lily Yeats):

'To / Lily or Susan, / with love from Jack / August 24th 1943 / To wish her a happy / and many happy Birthdays / here are plenty of Birthdays / also / Lives of Great and Little / men / Remind us / Reputations can be brittle / when / Far behind us.'

He must have been a lovely uncle.

Michael and Anne Yeats, the children of William B. and George Yeats (Georgina Hyde-Lees) received some interesting gifts of children’s books from the poet’s friends and fellow writers, including the poet, John Masefield and the writer, Padraic Colum. WBY himself gave his son classics such as The Odyssey of Homer and his own Collected Poems.

If you have any questions about the Yeats Family Library, please do email me at info@nli.ie.

I hope you find books and inscriptions of interest on the list: Collection Items: The Yeats Family Library

Máire Ní Chonalláin, Assistant Keeper II, Published Collections