The wonderful Jane Dixon-Smith has just delivered the covers for the Yeats-Gonne trilogy, Between The Words, and yes, I'm a tad excited! Jane's done a wonderful job as always.
These novels have been a long time in the writing. WB Yeats was 23-years-old when Maud Gonne came calling and what he called ‘the troubling of his life' began.
Yeats went on to forge a poetic career out of his unrequited love for Gonne, writing long and often about how he wanted to marry her. To this day Wikipedia accepts him at his word but the emotional truth of this fascinating relationship was a little different.
That's what's explored in the first part of the trilogy. The second looks at Yeats' relationship with Iseult, Maud's daughter, to whom he also proposed marriage twenty years later.
And the final book centres on the relationship between the mother and daughter, Maud and Iseult.
The research took ages, as I wanted to keep to the facts, which are more bizarre than any fiction I've ever written. Much of the dialogue has its origin in a letter or journal or notebook and as I wrote and researched, the line “you couldn't make it up” kept coming to mind.
Here's a sneak peek of the covers. All going well, I'll be publishing the first of the three, Her Secret Rose, in May 2015.