Maud Gonne, by contrast, was majestic, unearthly, appealing all at once; and her classic beauty came straight out of epic poetry. Immensely tall, bronze-haired, with a strong profile and beautiful skin, she was a fin- de-siecle beauty in Valkyrie mode: both her appearance and her character represented tragic passion. But there was also a vulnerable side, shown to few, which struck an immediate chord with WBY. He at once saw her as a “goddess”, and remembered her standing luminous as “apple blossom through which the light falls .. by a great heap of such blossoms in the window”. In January the blossom must have been almond, not apple: but the image remained, and the recognition. Implicitly, in his work, he had already cast a woman like this for a part in his life. Yet at the same time there was something curiously self-conscious in his immediate idealisation of her.

Even as he cast himself into thrall, like a Shelleyan hero, the writer in him was conscious of what he was doing.After the meeting on 30 January, they saw each other incessantly. WBY dined with Gonne, her sister Kathleen and her cousin May the very next day, where he was dazzled by the vehemence with which she baited a young military suitor of Kathleen, home on leave from India. WBY had dreamt of women like the girl in The Revolt of Islam “lawless women, without homes and without children”. He himself had conjured up dream-women of epic beauty, sadness and mystery: Gonne represented them all. And the fact that she saw him (or so he remembered) every evening for the next week could only be construed as encouragement.Gonne’s background was peripatetic and unstable.

Losing first her mother and then her adored father, brought up between London, France and his military postings in Ireland, she identified with that country as the one fixed point in her unhappy early life. She stressed her father’s alleged Kerry ancestry, along with the much more questionable supposition that he nurtured Home Rule ambitions. She and her sister possessed pounds 40,000 capital, around two million in today’s terms; she was well bred and beautiful; but she resolutely repudiated conventional “society”. The Dublin establishment would come to view her with alternate alarm and derision (“a great red- haired yahoo of a woman”, in the words of the timid Trinity don Louis Purser).