Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle of Friends

Jeanne Foster challenged the accepted role for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Born on a hardscrabble farm in the Adirondack Mountains in 1879, she was hailed as an important voice in American poetry by 1916 when her first books of verse, Neighbors of Yesterday and Wild Apples were published.

She had early success as a model--she was the Harrison Fisher girl of 1903--and later became a journalist for the American Review of Reviews. In 1918, she met John Quinn, patron of the arts, which placed her in the middle of some of the most important literary and artistic movements in the twentieth century. She counted among her friends John Butler and William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi. This book reveals her dark affair with Aleister Crowley and her great friendship with Tomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. Today, Jeanne Foster lies buried in Chestertown, New York, next to her old friend John Butler Yeats.

Author: Richard Londraville,Janis Londraville
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 09/01/2001
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.38lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.36w x 0.93d
ISBN: 9780815607304

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/29/2001 pg. 51
Library Journal 01/01/2002 pg. 104
Choice 02/01/2002 pg. 1049
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2002 pg. 221

About the Author

Richard Londraville is professor emeritus of literature at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

Janis Londraville, a literary historian and Fellow at the Center for Independent Scholars, Associated Colleges of the St. Lawrence Valley, is the editor of On Poetry, Painting, and Politics. They are coeditors of the book Too Long a Sacrifice: The Letters of Maud Gonne and John Quinn.