Yeats married Hyde-Lees in 1917, when he was 52 and she only 25. Theirs was not, initially, a happy union. The love of Yeats’ life had been Maud Gonne, a well-known Irish nationalist and famous beauty, who had ultimately rejected him. He seemed to have more luck with Maud’s daughter, Iseult, who, in 1915, at the age of 20, suggested to Yeats they should marry—yet her unspoiled youth was not Iseult’s only attraction to the older man.
Iseult had been conceived by Maud Gonne in some very strange circumstances with the French anarchist, Lucien Millevoye. Their first child together had died in infancy; therefore, in a bizarre and macabre attempt to reincarnate the baby, the couple had sex in the vault under the dead child’s grave. Maud became pregnant with Iseult, and Yeats, with his esoteric bent, would have been only too glad to marry such an unusual, supernaturally created being. However, by 1917, Iseult had decided that Yeats was simply too old for her. Yeats’ marriage to the only slightly more mature Hyde-Lees, a sometime fellow-experimenter in occult matters, was performed very much upon the rebound.
Predictably, things soon went wrong. Yeats plunged into a psychosomatic depression and felt too weak to consummate the union; all seemed over before it had even begun. But then, in October 1917, not quite a week after the wedding ceremony, Georgie suddenly felt an uncontrollable need to take up pen and paper—whereupon she found that she too could practise automatic writing, just like Bessie Radcliffe.
Yeats was delighted. All of a sudden, his wife held a new interest for him, and entire evenings were now spent side by side, with Yeats asking Georgie’s ‘Instructors,’ as they called themselves, to impart valuable information from the ‘Other Side,’ drawing the newly-weds closer to one another and creating a strange spiritual bond between them. In the words of Yeats’ biographer, R.F. Foster, “It is clear that through this strange process the principals were getting to know each other for the first time.”
Perhaps the couple should have done this before they got married, but never mind. The ‘Instructors’ wisely advised Yeats to stop brooding upon his lost love Iseult, to take more exercise, and to give poor Georgie some children to brighten up the place. They even ordered him to stop bothering his wife for more spirit-communications when she was menstruating! It is reasonable to suspect that Georgie was the source of these messages, an idea given more credence by the apparent existence of a separate breed of spirits from the ‘Instructors’ called the ‘Frustrators.’ These ghosts, whenever Yeats asked his wife questions about matters she had no direct knowledge of, would conveniently step in and say “No, I may not speak of these mysteries.”