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"Printed by the Weird Sisters in the Year of the Big Wind:"

wrote Elizabeth Yeats in 1899, in her article, "Why Brushwork should be included in all Kindergarten Time-Tables." At the time of the article’s publication, Elizabeth Yeats was a kindergarten teacher who had little idea that she would spend her life in another occupation, illustrating herself the very qualities she hoped all children would develop through artistic training. The least recognized of all of John Butler Yeats’s children, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats spent much of her life, to varying degrees, in the shadows of her world-renown poet brother William B. Yeats, of her other brother, the successful painter Jack Yeats, and of her sister Susan Yeats, the "favorite" daughter of the family. "Lolly," as Elizabeth Yeats was frequently called, suffered acutely from her father’s unabashed preference for her sister "Lily," Susan Yeats. She also envied Jack’s position as a recognized painter and a married man, somewhat independent from the family, although her relationship with Jack was probably the warmest. And she continually battled against William’s often imperious and patronizing manner towards her. Nevertheless, despite numerous challenges and the relatively unsupportive attitude of her family, Elizabeth Yeats distinguished herself as a remarkable woman, equal to her more famous brother William in her strength of personality, dedication to her work, and commitment to a craft. Although hers was the printing, rather than the molding of words, Elizabeth Yeats’s craft was an important one, especially in her time. Through her work at the Dun Emer Press and later the Cuala Press, Elizabeth was able to make a lasting and valuable contribution to Ireland, to the women’s movement, and to the craft of printing itself.

When Elizabeth Yeats wrote the article "Why Brushwork should be included in all Kindergarten Time-Table," she could not have known that her few writings on brushwork would change her life forever. One of her manuals on brushwork brought her to the attention of Emery Walker, typographical adviser for William Morris at the Kelmscott Press and along with Cobden-Sanderson, co-director of the Doves Press. Recognizing a talent for book design in her page layouts, Walker encouraged Elizabeth to establish her own printing press as a part of a co-operative industry. Although completely ignorant of the particularities of printing, Elizabeth accepted the suggestion and promptly enrolled herself in a four-week crash course at the Women’s Printing Society in Westminster. At the end of the month, she returned to Ireland and along with her sister Lily, joined Evelyn Gleeson’s Dun Emer Industries, an all-women co-operative in Dublin. Evelyn Gleeson herself would head the weaving and tapestry department, Lily was taken on as the head of the embroidery department, and Lolly was the head of the press. So, in 1903, with two assistant girls straight out of grammar school and an almost half-century old Albion hand press acquired through newspaper advertisements, the Dun Emer Press began with its first publication, William Butler Yeats’s In the Seven Woods [Image 1, Image 2, Image 3]. Six years later, due to disagreements with Evelyn Gleeson, the two Yeats sisters left Dun Emer Industries and established the Cuala Industries. Through the Cuala Press, Elizabeth Yeats was to publish over sixty works, in combination with her work at the Dun Emer Press the greatest number of works published by any private press of the era./(2)

From the beginning of her time as a printer, Elizabeth was fully committed to making her press a completely Irish endeavor. The prospectus for the Dun Emer Industries begins, "A wish to find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things was the beginning of Dun Emer," and later continues, "Everything as far as possible, is Irish. . . ." /(3) When Elizabeth Yeats left Dun Emer Industries to found the Cuala Press she took these principles with her, and operated her new press with the same aims. She worked with young Irish women, whom she trained not only in the printing, painting, and drawing crafts, but also in Irish dance, language, and games. She consistently used, with the exception of war time, the same Irish all-rag, mouldmade paper, produced locally at Swiftbrook Paper Mills in Saggart, County Dublin. When she deviated from this norm at her press, it was only with the publication of broadsides, for which she used Irish cartridge paper, also from Swiftbrook Paper Mills. Although the type was Caslon, not an especially Irish type, and the ink was German, the spirit of the press was decidedly Irish.

Much later, years after the establishment of the Cuala Press, Elizabeth Yeats continued in her unflagging insistence on the authenticity of the Irish cause and on the "Irishness" of her press. For many years she and her sister employed two girls whom they knew to be members of the IRA until the Press was raided in 1923 during the Civil War and the two girls were arrested. Certainly more demonstrative of her commitment to Cuala as a purely Irish industry is an incident in the latest years of Cuala under Elizabeth. In 1938, when the Cuala Press was in the most desperate financial straits and looking for a potential wealthy backer to help it survive, several of Elizabeth’s wealthier and well-connected friends suggest that she contact R. T. C. Hull, an affluent Englishman. But Elizabeth rejected the idea, saying, "We ought to get someone Irish if possible, but no-one here has a father who would put £3,000 into anything but Guinness."/(4) Ranging from the material that provided the text for her books to the people she would allow to be connected with her Press, Elizabeth Yeats was vigilant and exacting in her demands for what would be the standard of Irishness for her Press.

The Irish theme was guaranteed not only in the raw material, but also in the literary. Elizabeth’s and Susan’s literary brother, William, was the editor for the press. With two exceptions, works by Ezra Pound and Rabindranath Tagore [Image 4, Image 5, Image 6], all the publications produced by the Cuala Press were by contemporary Irish authors generally treating Irish subjects. In the Introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan [Image 7, Image 8], Pound’s compilation of several Noh pieces, Yeats explains, "In the series of books I edit for my sister I confine myself to those that have I believe some special value to Ireland, now or in the future. I have asked Mr. Pound for these beautiful plays because I think they will help me to explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic movement."/(5) Yeats himself attempted to demonstrate the kind of innovation and benefit he thought Irish theater could derive from foreign influences in his short play The Dreaming of the Bones. In this piece revolving around the particularly Irish themes of loyalty to lover and country and the conflicts between the two, of patriotism, and of betrayal, the actual form of the play follows that of the very Japanese Noh plays published in the Cuala Press collection. Clearly, any exception to the list of Irish authors must be justified in terms of value as vision and instructive example. Yeats, "generally required an Irish author and Irish subject matter for Dun Emer and Cuala. When one or both conditions are not met, he usually feels some explanation is in order." /(6) In fact, the Cuala Press published first editions of many of William Butler Yeats’s works as well as many of the first editions of every other major Irish literary figure of the early twentieth century, with one major exception. James Joyce, whose name is conspicuously absent from the list of famous Irish writers published by the Press, nevertheless maintains some connection to Cuala when he alludes, in a less than complimentary fashion, to the press in the opening portion of Ulysses./(7) A perusal of the complete listing of all of the Cuala Press’s publications turns up illustrious names such as John M. Synge, Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, George Russell (AE), Katharine Tynan, and Frank O’Connor. In addition, many of the illustrations, especially for the Broadsides, were executed by Jack Yeats, a painter of recognized talent [Image 9]. As a result of Elizabeth Yeats’s deference to her brother’s judgment of literary merit, she felt confident that her Press was producing high quality books of great cultural value to Ireland, especially in the time of the Irish Renaissance. The listing of her publications is indeed an impressive compilation of many of Ireland’s greatest writers of the twentieth century.

However, Elizabeth did not always defer to her brother in everything; in many ways her strong personality and success as a craftswoman, despite her sex, was a great contribution to the women’s movement. Her relationship to her brother demonstrates her refusal to see her sex as inferior. As the head of the Cuala Press, Elizabeth Yeats felt that she had certain rights as well as responsibilities that her brother, for all his raging fits and notorious temper, could not violate. Although she did generally rely on William’s decisions as editor to determine what to print, Elizabeth did at times take the initiative in publishing items even without William’s approval. For example, she published both a collection of poems edited by George Russell as well as a collection of poems by Edward Dowden, a friend of John Yeats, without William’s consent. Outraged, ". . . more than once he accused her of attempting to subvert his editorial authority by accepting inferior work for publication."/(8) In a hand-written inscription to James Healy in one copy of Dowden’s A Woman’s Reliquary, Yeats claims, "I had nothing to do with this book, a temporary rebellion on the part of my sisters."/(9) However, Elizabeth refused to let her brother supersede her own judgments in printing. She needed to make the best decisions she could because of her dependence on the Cuala Press for her and her sister’s livelihood. If William could not supply the books to be printed, then Elizabeth would find them herself. She had to publish books that she could sell in order to make badly needed money, and "Like all good printers, she had her own standards and was not to be distracted by genius or glory."/(10) Regarding her brother William, especially his overbearing attitude towards her, she writes in a letter to her patron and advisor Emery Walker, "I don’t want a dictator for my press, but a literary advisor."/(11) William and Elizabeth, in light of the situation at the Press, clearly differed in what they conceived as the appropriate role for women. ". . . [T]he press was to continue to be a source of irritation between brother and sister. This is hardly surprising considering Lolly’s sense of herself as a hard-working, independent woman and William’s notion that ‘a woman gets her thoughts through the influence of a man. A man is to her what work is to a man.’"/(12) But Elizabeth would show that her work was not inferior to any man’s. In her unwillingness to be cowed by her famous brother’s virulent diatribes in the interest of keeping the Press financially afloat, Elizabeth showed herself to be a woman with a firm grasp of practicalities and a strong will.

Elizabeth Yeats’s most obvious contribution to the women’s movement, however, lay in her very relationship to the Cuala Press, as its founder and chief. William Butler Yeats was the literary editor of a press created and maintained by his sister, who would spend most of her time thinking about her works as well as "getting her thoughts" through it. The establishment of the Cuala Press was a considerable achievement, especially for a woman at that time, and in the beginning of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Yeats and the Cuala Press were a kind of anomaly in the printing industry. Unlike Lily, who specialized in embroidery, a traditionally female form of employment, Lolly broke into a field dominated by men. The printing industry had been using women as compositors since the sixteenth century, but few presses were actually in the hands of women. Although contemporary with the Cuala Press, the Daniel Press and the Eragny Press employed women only insofar as they were the wives or children of the head male directors. William Morris employed a woman in a relatively high position at his Kelmscott Press, but she was the exception rather than the rule, and he was even forced to go to court in her defense because the Trade Unions, which protested women in the workplace, at that time were gaining momentum. In addition, since women were not allowed apprenticeships, they rarely could compete in the competitive market with well-trained men. One historian of the Arts and Crafts movement of the time notes,

Typically, women were relegated to the secondary roles of coloring, filling in, or otherwise finishing and perfecting male designs. The Cuala Press, therefore, was an exceptional example of a press set up by a woman, run exclusively by women, and influenced by women’s designs. From the beginning until her death, Elizabeth took an active role in the artistic and creative process. ". . . [S]he added her contribution with the design of the illustrated pages: her blocks and her colophons were peculiarly her own."/(14) As a result of her decision, all of her books also have some writing in red type, often in the title and the colophon. In addition the first pressmark for Elizabeth Yeats’s books, printed under the Dun Emer label, was designed by a woman named Elinor Monsell in 1907 [Image 4]. Later in 1932, with the Cuala Press, Elizabeth replaced Monsell’s, "The Lady Emer Standing by a Tree" with a pressmark of her own design, "Lone Tree in an Irish Landscape." [Image 10] She explains in a letter to a bibliophile in Scotland, "I don’t think the tree and lady have any meaning—except that our press was started a s a women’s press. She is a very limp figure is she not? Much as Cuala makes me feel."/(15) As artist or director, Elizabeth was not going to let herself be a "limp figure," especially in her own business. On the contrary, Elizabeth was similar to her brother William in her high level of energy and was apparently rather physically fit. Another argument for the exclusion of women from the printing industry at that time had been that women were simply not strong enough to manipulate the necessary machinery, but "in Ireland Elizabeth remained unobserved by the authorities, carrying out tasks that were thought too heavy for her sister compositors in Edinburgh, but never coming to the attention of any industrial inspectors."/(16)

Elizabeth was able to avoid conflict with the Trade Union in Ireland and so never was inspected by the authorities. But being located in Ireland posed other problems for Elizabeth that compounded already existing issues she had as a woman in charge of a business that was traditionally male. One effect of the passage of the Home Rule Bill through parliament in 1914 was that the Catholic Church became more influential and authoritative in Ireland as its hegemony grew in the now more independent Irish state. Therefore, the already restrictive views of women’s places in society became even narrower under the church’s purview.

By breaching those contemporary stereotypes of women in the craft industry, Elizabeth Yeats was making a powerful statement to society and to the prevailing social attitudes of the day. Moreover, she was moving in a sphere normally closed off to women in a society especially insistent on the woman’s traditional role. Although at first glance it appears as if neither of the Yeats sisters had any choice in finding outside employment in order to support their family, there was an important distinction between Lily and Lolly—Lily

". . . felt that Lolly had one advantage over her as she had always wanted to work outside the home and she was proud of the work she did at the Press."/(18) Elizabeth Yeats was certainly the more progressive and ambitious of the two, and her pride in her work was that of any fine craftsman. This same distinction between Lolly and Lily that is visible in their attitude toward their professional lives is evident in their personal lives as well. When contrasting John Quinn’s and Lily’s relationship to her own relationship to Quinn, "She [Lolly] recognized that although John Quinn seemed to like and respect her she was far too sharp and energetic for him."/(19) Unfortunately, as a result of her being seen as eccentric, Elizabeth’s real health problems were continually dismissed as psychosomatic or as results of a mental disturbance. "The current medical opinion was that women who insisted on escaping domesticity and taking on men’s work were likely to suffer from mental disorder."/(20) Elizabeth, however, despite her sister’s and father’s repeated assertion of her mental instability, never failed to perform at work or in teaching the younger girls, both demanding and taxing tasks. Every day, through her work with the Cuala Press, Elizabeth was showing that women could have professional lives.

Under those circumstances in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century, that Elizabeth was able to begin her own private printing press is impressive, but the success with which she ran the press for thirty-two years is astounding. The apparent considerable outward achievements of the press belied the financial struggle for survival in which the Press was constantly engaged. Incidental to her contributions to Ireland’s cultural heritage as well as—albeit unwittingly—to the women’s movement were Elizabeth Yeats’s contributions to the printing craft itself. Over the years, Cuala Press, having at its beginning been influenced by the principles of William Morris and his Kelmscott Press and assisted at its beginning in part by Emery Walker and the Doves Press, became a reputable Press in its own right, with Elizabeth Yeats as a respected woman in the industry. In 1913, ". . . John Yeats wrote to Lolly berating her for taking up a stance against her brother and reminding her that people bought Cuala books largely because William was the editor.. . ."/(21) but within a decade, the Cuala Press was attracting buyers on the strength of more than just its literary editor alone. Elizabeth Yeats was succeeding on her own merit and not just on her brother’s. "Newspaper comments make it clear that Elizabeth’s press had a reputation of its own, quite independent of the fact that W. B. Yeats was her brother and whose poetry she published."/(22) Her natural artistic sense, combined with her artistic skill, careful handwork, patience, experience, and fidelity to quality in all aspects of the craft made Elizabeth Yeats’s books valuable items. She and the Cuala Press were recognized by reviewers in both Ireland, as in the Dublin Evening Telegraph, and England. One writer for the Observer (30 September 1923) wrote,

The review continued its praise, pointing out that while all of the most famous private presses in England generally published only classic works already previously published, Elizabeth Yeats’s Cuala books were consistently the first editions of new "important works." Naturally, the Cuala books would be set apart in this way, more foreward-looking than back. Elizabeth’s endeavors for Ireland were attempts to promote the new Irish artists. Her endeavors as a woman in a man’s world were inherently progressive, foreshadowing a future with more freedom for women in the workplace.

By excelling in her craft, Elizabeth Yeats also had pushed forward the Irish cultural movement as well as the women’s cause, and became an inspiring example for many. When Elizabeth Corbet Yeats died on January 16, 1940, she left behind her a unique legacy for Ireland and for the history of women as well as for the printing industry in which she labored for almost forty years. Her legacy also included the patience, care, and knowledge she had imparted to two of the "Cuala girls," Esther Ryan, who worked with Elizabeth for thirty-seven years, and Maire Gill, who had worked with her for thirty-two, and both of whom "had become excellent presswomen in their own right."/(24) Surprisingly, against all odds, Lolly had emerged as another talented Yeats. Although initially the sister least praised and respected, she was not destined to be relegated to the dark recesses of her brother William’s shadow. Elizabeth Yeats’s influence in Ireland had been considerable too, and her work with the Cuala Press was a masterpiece of its own kind. Today many would agree with the reviewer for the Catholic Times (20 March 1929) who declared, "Her influence in encouraging the production of beautiful books can hardly be exaggerated, and she has created one of the most distinguished achievements of modern Ireland."/(25)

1. Appendix 1 in Gifford Lewis, The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala (Irish Academic Press, 1994) pp. 185-6.
2. Biographical material on Elizabeth C. Yeats from Hardwick’s The Yeats Sisters and Lewis’s The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala.
3. As reproduced in Liam Miller, The Dun Emer Press, Later the Cuala Press (Dolmen Press, 1973), p. 15.
4. As quoted in Lewis, p. 177.
5. Ezra Pound, (ed.), Certain Noble Plays of Japan (Cuala Press, 1916), p. 1.
6. Edward O’Shea, Yeats as Editor (Dolmen Press, 1975), p. 37.
7. In the opening episode of Ulysses Buck Mulligan says to his English companion, "Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind." These lines are a parody of one of Elizabeth Yeats’s colophons. She had the habit of printing the year in the colophon as "the year of" some event that that occurred in that year [Image 3, Image 8].
8. Michael Stanford, W. B. Yeats and the Irish Renaissance (Stanford University Libraries, 1990), p. 12.
9. Edward Dowden, A Woman’s Reliquary (Cuala Press, 1913).
10. Mary Chenoweth Stratton, (ed.), Printing as Art: William Morris and His Circle of Influence (The Press of Appletree Alley, 1994), p. 12.
11. Ibid., p. 43.
12. A quotation from Yeats’s Autobiography in Joan Hardwick, The Yeats Sisters (Pandora, 1996), p. 148
13. Anthea Callen. Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement. 1870-1914 (Astragal Books, 1979), p. 183.
14. Ibid., p. 119.
15. As quoted in Lewis, p. 170.
16. Lewis, pp. 38-9.
17. Callen, p. 221.
18. Hardwick, p. 176.
19. Ibid., p. 115.
20. Joan Hardwick, p. 171.
21. Ibid., p. 181.
22. Lewis, p. 167.
23. Lewis. p. 167.
24. Ibid., p. 182.
25. As quoted in Hardwick, pp. 167-8

Dowden, Edward. A Woman’s Reliquary. Dublin: Cuala Press, 1913.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997.

Pound, Ezra. Ed, Certain Noble Plays of Japan. Dublin: Cuala Press, 1916.

Hardwick, Joan. The Yeats Sisters. San Francisco: Pandora, 1996.

Lewis, Gifford. The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala . Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994

Miller, Liam. The Dun Emer Press, Later the Cuala. Press Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1973.

O’Shea, Edward. Yeats as Edito.r Dublin:Dolmen Press, 1975.