A personal tragedy means the young English heiress, Maud Gonne, must leave the Ireland she has come to love, to return to the hated home of her patriarchal uncle in London. The young Irish poet WB Yeats, too, is forced by his father to leave his Dublin life where he has been using occult arts to fuel his writing, and to try to bend the woman he loves to his will. Also on that ferryboat is Paddy Cross, an Irish country boy who soon finds himself adrift in London’s criminal underworld.

Three lonely young people, threatened by forces beyond their control, coming of age in an era of international unrest and intrigue. Thus begins an intricately plotted and meticulously researched mix of fictional and factual stories. 

The passionate love for Maud Gonne that Yeats immortalised in his poetry begins here. It is the first book in the Gonne-Yeats series, a dazzling seven-book sequence about the real-life, love triangle between the Nobel laureate poet WB Yeats, and the mother and daughter Maud and Iseult Gonne. 

This first book in the series, a standalone novel in itself, introduces her cast of extraordinary characters as the three young seekers try to overcome the death or destruction that has suddenly erupted in their lives. 

Told in the magical voice of the narrator-romancer, Rosy Cross, the ‘oldest woman in Ireland’, this story brings to life bohemian Dublin, London and Paris–and reveals hidden aspects of the famous poet, the revolutionary activist, and the lives they touched in this time of land agitation, class struggle, and fledgling women's rights movement.

Effortlessly traversing the Irish land wars, the Parisian demi-monde, and the London slums and stage, in A Life Before Orna Ross goes behind the towering reputation of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats to create an unforgettable tale of rich and poor, young and old, romance and reality, invention and truth.