Entire Worlds In a Footnote

I love books where entire worlds open up in the footnotes. I have often followed the trail of footnotes and found books that have become ultimate favorites of all time, because of the mention in a footnote. The footnotes to the letters of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats are spectacular, but again, the person I would want to talk about all of this with is no longer here, so I feel a bit stopped up when I read a paragraph about this or that person and don’t know where to turn. Please be careful in how you comment (unless, that is, you are my family or my friends who actually know me). Maud Gonne wrote in a letter to Yeats, nervous about advice she had given him:

I fear it seems like uncalledfor advice (which is a thing I have in horror!)

As do I. Seriously, unless I ask, don’t give. Many thanks.

I want to talk to him and say, “So tell me more about John O’Leary” or “John O’Mahoney”, or pretty much anyone, and he would not hesitate. He would not say, “Never heard of him”, not to anyone appearing in THESE pages anyway.

My point here is: check out just ONE of the footnotes in this collection of letters (below): The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938. This is just ONE, and they are ALL like that.

Now I would like to point out that many of these people are not unknown to me, due to the family I grew up in, and my influences growing up, etc. I need no introduction to Patrick Pearse or Wolfe Tone or all the rest. It’s these OTHER people, just as fascinating, who make these brief cameo appearances – but I want to follow every trail.

Here is just one example of a footnote that blew my mind:

Florence Farr (1869-1917) was an actress; she married Edward Emery, an actor, in 1884 and they were divorced in 1894. Also in 1894 she acted in WBY’s play The Land of Heart’s Desire at the Avenue Theatre, which was sponsored by Annie Horniman. She joined the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, becoming praemonstratrix in 1895. After disagreements with WBY and Annie Horniman she left the Order in 1902. In the first decade of the twentieth century she collaborated with WBY in his experiments with verse speaking to the psaltery. In Dublin she appeared as Aleel in the first production of WBY’s The Countess Cathleen in 1899 nand recited to the psaltery at the Antient Concert Rooms in 1902. In 1912 she went to Ceylon to become the headmistress of a girls’ school; she died there of cancer.

Florence Farr was an important person in Yeats’ life, a name well-known to any Yeats fanatic – I barely knew anything about her except her intersection with him, and I still don’t feel I know anything, but Jesus, just reading that short biography makes me want to know EVERYTHING. And while surely you could just Google her (as I most certainly will) – there is something lovely about sitting in the not-knowing for a bit, and contemplating that evocative footnote, full of an entire life. Even just that one footnote brings up a million questions for me. And do not ruin my fun by providing me with a Wikipedia page that I could just as easily find myself, like looking something up on IMDB or something!!

What a footnote like that means to me is an entire world has opened up in my mind. What was with her divorce? It must have been a scandal, but what was really going on there? And Ceylon? Really now! I would love to know how that choice came about.

Wikipedia might provide answers but they are colorless compared to the answers I used to receive, the perceptive hands pulling a book down off the shelf where he could point to this or that passage, coloring in the edges for me about people. The gravelly voice saying, immediately, upon my question, “Well, she was born in County Donegal to Anglo-Irish aristocrats…” or what have you.

That is what I miss. That is what I long for. That is what those footnotes make me think of.

Here’s another one:

Sarah Purser (1848-1943), a Dublin artist, was a friend of the Yeats family. WBY described her as ‘so clever a woman that people found it impossible to believe she was a bad painter.’ He recorded her comments on MG: ‘Maud Gonne talks politics in Paris, and literature to you, and at the Horse Show she would talk of a clinking brood mare.’ He had earlier disliked one of her portraits of MG, and she had met him ‘with the sentence, “so Maud Gonne is dying in the South of France and her portrait is on sale,” and went on to tell how she had lunched with Maud Gonne in Paris and there was a very tall Frenchman there [probably Mellevoye] – and I thought she dwelt upon his presence for my sake – and the doctor had said to her “They will both be dead in six months”‘. As a founder member of the Friends of the National Collection in 1924, she was instrumental in securing Charlemount House as the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, where the Lane Collection was housed when it came to Dublin.

A world. A whole world.