'She Set Me Writing My First Play': Laura Armstrong and Yeats's Early Drama (Critical Essay‪)‬

'She interests me far more than Miss Gonne does and yet is [sic] only as a myth and a symbol.' (1) Critics have not been kind to Laura Armstrong, the first woman to inspire Yeats to write plays and verse. Scholars tend to overlook Armstrong's importance, dismissing her influential relationship with the young writer as a flirtation: R. E Foster calls her 'pretty, unstable, and already spoken for', (2) David Clark labels her a 'tantalizing witch', (3 and Keith Alldritt sums her up as 'a flirt and a tease'. (4) In fact, Yeats's brief friendship with Laura Armstrong in 1884 was not only responsible for his initial serious interest in drama, (5) but their relationship also influenced Yeats as he began, soon after meeting her, to create his first major female figures in a series of short plays, Vivien and Time, the revised Time and the Witch Vivien, The Island of the Statues, and Mosada. While the larger-than-life female characters that dominate each of these plays celebrate Armstrong's unconventional strengths, their deaths dramatize Yeats's ambivalence about her upper class status and particularly her female power. The works he wrote with Armstrong in mind stand as important precedents, particularly in their examinations of the links between class, gender, and performance. Yeats would bring the symbolic figures he began imagining after meeting Armstrong to the stage for the rest of his life in plays that both celebrate and limit female power.