News at Eleven: Had she lived longer, Lady Augusta Gregory

might have tempered the increasingly strident political views W.B. Yeats adopted in the late 1930s. She might also have discouraged the poet's "somewhat adolescent dalliances" with women half his age, students at the 53rd International Yeats Summer School in Sligo heard yesterday.

James Pethica, director of the school, explored Yeats's "massively conflicted" feelings on the death of his oldest friend, concluding that, as well as being a blow he had dreaded, her passing was a "liberation".

from The Irish Times: Yeats was 'conflicted' about death of close friend Lady Gregory

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