Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats married George Hyde-Lees in 1917. He proposed to her after being turned down by Irish patriot Maud Gonne and by her daughter, Iseult Gonne.
Born in 1897, Bertha Georgiana Hyde-Lees was more commonly known as George and shared Yeats’s interest in the occult. She served as his secretary during his years in the Irish Senate (1922–28) and as secretary of the Dublin Drama League. Later she took over the running of Cuala Press, an Arts and Crafts press founded by Yeats’s sisters, Susan and Elizabeth Yeats.
The couple had two children: Anne Butler Yeats, born in 1919, and William Michael Yeats, born in 1921. After her husband’s death in 1939, George Yeats became his literary executor. She died in 1968.