Thank you to author and publisher Sally North, who attended our live creative salon last week to discuss the live and work of Althea Gyles.
And thanks to Andrea Mai, Phyllisann, Stefan Baciu, and many others for tuning in.
Althea Gyles was a poet and artist from a prominent Anglo-Irish family, which according to W. B. Yeats, was ‘so haughty that their neighbours called them the Royal Family.’
She became estranged from the family, left for Dublin and then London to become an artist, worked with two of the most successful Irish writers of the day: Yeats and Oscar Wilde, had a love affair with publisher and pornographer Leonard Smithers, and turned up in a book by Aleister Crowley.
Her artworks were stunning and have lasted. In 2016 I reproduced one of her covers for a collectors’ edition of 500 books, which sold out.
W.B. Yeats said of her poetry that
Miss Althea Gyles may come to be one of the most important of the little group of Irish poets who seek to express indirectly through myths and symbols, or directly in litt…
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