Life
1868-1940 [; Elizabeth Corbet; Lolly; ‘Lollie’]; b. 23 Fitzroy
Rd., London; yngr sis. of W. B. Yeats; trains as Froebel teacher in Bedford
College; acts as art teacher in Condon Co. Council School; on return of
the Yeats’s to Dublin, 1900, accepted invitation to join Evelyn Gleeson
in Dun Emer Guild, Churchtown, and took enthusiastically to printing;
managed the Dun Emer hand Press from 1902 and, independently, the Cuala
Press from 1904, publishing over sixty books incl. 48 of Yeats’s
using Caslon Old Face type, 1903-1946; briefly caricatured by James Joyce
in Ulysses (‘printed by the wierd sisters in the year of the
big wind’); d. 16 Jan.; portrait by John B. Yeats [NGI]; she was
the first hand-press printer to work in Ireland since the 18th century.
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Criticism
William M. Murphy, ‘Psychic Daughter, Mystic Son, Sceptic Father’, in George Mills Harper, ed., Yeats and the Occult, Macmillan 1976), pp.11-26.
Gifford Lewis, The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala Press (Dublin: IAP 1995).
Joan Hardwick, The Yeats Sisters: A Biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats (London: Pandora 1996), 271pp., 16 ills.
Maureen Murphy, ed., I Call to the Eye of the Mind: a Memoir of Sara Hyland (Dublin: Attic Press 1996), 204pp.
R. O. Dougan, W. B. Yeats: Manuscripts and Printed Books Exhibited in the Library of TCD (1956), 17-18.
Liam Miller, ‘The Dun Emer and the Cuala Press’, in Robin Skelton & Ann Saddlemyer, eds., The World of W. B. Yeats (1965), pp.141-51.
Robin Skelton, ‘Twentieth Century Irish literature and the Private Press Tradition’, in Massechusetts Review (Winter 1964), pp.368-77 [bibl. from A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1984, p.73].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)