Not just a sister act - Frank McNally on the neglected Yeats sisters, and their even more neglected collaborator

“Neglected reputations: The Forgotten Yeats sisters, Lily and Elizabeth” read the headline of a feature on our arts pages in March.

“Overshadowed by brothers WB and Jack, the female siblings were key to the Celtic revival and powerhouses behind Dun Emer and Cuala outlets for female writers and artists,” said the subhead, over a piece flagging the inaugural Yeats Sisters Symposium, which takes place this coming Saturday.

Fair enough. The neglect of women in Ireland’s revolutionary generation certainly needs redressing.

But at the risk of reducing the issue to a card game, please excuse me while I see the symposium organisers’ Yeats Sisters and raise them Evelyn Gleeson, an even more neglected woman without whom the siblings might never have become the powerhouses they were.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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It was Gleeson (1855-1944) who founded the Dun Emer Press in 1902, putting up all the money that her collaborators, Lily and Elizabeth, didn’t have.

Although born in England, she was continuing a tradition of practical patriotism begun by her father who, struck during a visit home by Ireland’s poverty and unemployment, established the Athlone Woollen Mills in 1859.

Evelyn was a suffragist as well as a nationalist. She set up Dun Emer to advance both causes, training young Irish women in printing, weaving and other crafts, using native materials.

It is true that she and the Yeats sisters soon had disagreements and that this resulted in their version of another great Irish tradition: the split. But when the sisters went on to establish the Cuala publishing house in 1908, it was with the printing press Gleeson had bought.

In the meantime, the row led the Yeats sisters to do an interview about Dun Emer with an American magazine in which Gleeson was not mentioned, something her former arts and crafts movement mentor, Alexander Millar, considered a case of “Hamlet without the Prince”.

But that seems to have set a pattern, repeated ever since. When this newspaper ran a feature on Dun Emer in 1961, with only a cursory reference to Gleeson, it provoked a letter from her niece correcting the record.

The letter concluded: “No doubt the fame of WB Yeats was a great help to his sisters in their work, especially after they went to Cuala, but it was Evelyn Gleeson who made that work possible.”

More than 60 years later, it was another descendant – historian and former Garda Michael Gleeson – who drew my attention to his ancestor’s continuing neglect, which this week’s event seems to perpetuate.

Perhaps Evelyn Gleeson deserves a separate symposium. Or perhaps, to counter the whiff of Yeatsian imperialism, future events on the sisters should find a way to incorporate her in the title too.

It might not be as catchy, but there are precedents for famous siblings making room on the bill for non-relatives: the Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur and the Clancys and Tommy Makem to name just two.

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When The Guardian published a similar piece on the Yeats siblings a while back, the subhead suggested the sisters were overlooked in Ireland “except for a scornful reference in Ulysses”, which had not even named them.

That reference is in the opening chapter of Joyce’s epic, where Buck Mulligan teases the Irish-culture-seeking Englishman Haines about a prospective book: “Five lines of text and 10 pages of notes about the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.”

But if it’s any consolation to the sisters’ memory, Mulligan is also being scornful of their famous brother WB, equally unnamed there: the “fishgods” being a nod to his writings on Gaelic folklore.

This and the reference to Dundrum – long synonymous with a mental hospital – suggest, in one Joycean critic’s summary of Mulligan’s thoughts, that “the [Dun Emer Press], and all three Yeats siblings, belong in a lunatic asylum”.

As for the “year of the big wind”, that was a straight quote from the sisters themselves, via the eccentric concluding note to their inaugural publication: “Here ends In The Seven Woods, written by William Butler Yeats, printed, upon paper made in Ireland, and published by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats at the Dun Emer Press, in the house of Evelyn Gleeson at Dundrum in the County of Dublin, Ireland, finished the 16th day of July, in the year of the big wind, 1903.”

In fairness, the storm of February 26th and 27th that year was indeed a big one and must have created a lot of Irish paper. In Dublin’s Phoenix Park alone, it felled almost 3,000 trees.

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Speaking of big windy things and Ulysses, I see that Boris Johnson has named his latest child Odysseus, the Greek version of the Homeric hero. Less predictably, and more worrying for some of us, the baby is also to be called Frank. His full name is Frank Alfred Odysseus, or FAO for short: a plea for attention that, in all the circumstances, was hardly necessary.