Portrait of George Yeats

Abstract

It was in the early 1960s that Derry Jeffares and I first met, over coffee at Bewley’s. The invitation came from him, who had heard of me from our mutual benefactor George Yeats. It cannot have been an easy encounter for either of us—a young scholar just embarking on my study of Synge’s manuscripts, I still felt an interloper in the field of Irish studies: a Dubliner by birth and a Trinity graduate, he moved about the city and through the minutiae of Yeatsiana with comfortable insouciance. It..