John for dictating the text but did not mention the medium who took dictation from the departed. Charles Wentworth Littlefield’s medium for The Beginning and Way of Life was not so lucky. “The sentiments expressed by no means represent those of the Medium or of myself.” Lady Doyle at least got a dedication acknowledgement. “It is now five years since the great gift of inspired writing first came to my wife,” wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the introduction to a collection of his wife’s automatic writing, Pheneas Speaks. George wasn’t the only spiritual collaborator to be cheated of proper coauthor credit for her writing. “To my wife,” the proposed dedication read, “who created this system which bores her, who made possible these pages which she will never read…” George rejected it. Yeats did offer to dedicate a later edition to her. In at least seven editions of A Vision, George has never been credited as a co-author. Yeats’ name was the only one on the title page. “Much of the literary output of one of our century’s major poets from the year of his marriage on was directly influenced by a unique imaginative partnership with a highly creative woman.” George’s supernatural writings were eventually published in a book called A Vision. It took decades for Yeats scholarship to state the obvious: “We are having to take an extraordinary fact into far more serious consideration than we have before,” wrote Margaret Mills Harper in 1988. Most importantly, the spirits provided Yeats with raw material for his poems. Their advice didn’t end there: They suggested he switch to a healthier diet, hinted when George was ovulating so the couple could have a baby, and offered helpful suggestions on how Yeats could make sex more enjoyable for George. Conveniently, the spirits got to work extracting Yeats from his obsession with Maud and Iseult. In their first three years together, they averaged three automatic writing sessions a week, creating 4,000 pages of material dictated by the spirits through George to her husband. The clairvoyant couple were inexhaustible. Throwing away his correspondence with his former flames, Yeats’ became obsessed with his new wife. George’s new husband was one of the fascinated. Starting with Victorianism, and resurging after a generation perished in World War I, spiritualist experiments to communicate with the dead via table turning, tarot, séances, and the occult had fascinated western society. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer.” Automatic writing, where, according to believers, a spirit guides the pencil of a living medium as he or she writes out the spirit’s message, wasn’t unheard of at the time. “On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage,” wrote Yeats, “my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. Instead, playing on their mutual interest in spiritualism and the occult, George tried a novel approach to saving her marriage. Another newlywed might have told Yeats to take a long walk into the Lake of Innisfree. Mere days into their honeymoon at the Ashdown Forest Hotel, Georgie (renamed George by her husband) must have had a ghostly suspicion-or perhaps simply seen the poorly hidden fact-that Yeats was still writing wistful letters to Iseult. Playing on their mutual interest in spiritualism and the occult, George tried a novel approach to saving her marriage.
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