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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Rory Carroll Ireland correspondent

The forgotten ‘weird sisters’ of WB Yeats who helped forge Irish identity

Lily and Elizabeth Yeats in 1900
Lily and Elizabeth Yeats in 1900. The sisters’ Cuala Press bolstered a fragile national confidence in newly independent Ireland. Photograph: The Board of Trinity College Dublin

In Ireland, Elizabeth and Lily Yeats are remembered if at all as the “weird sisters” – a fleeting, scornful reference in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The novel did not name them or elaborate on their alleged weirdness, just as a male-dominated view of Irish history overlooked them except as minor players in an artistic movement.

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