William Butler Yeats, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, 2 vols (Churchtown, Dundrum: The Calua Press, 1915)

Hassett 3 & Hassett 4

Overlooked, belittled, and long-remembered only as Yeats’s ‘weird sisters’, they ran the first female private printing press

St John’s College has diverse holdings of private press books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among these are six volumes produced by the Irish Calua Press, the only early private
press entirely run by women. In 1902 Elizabeth (1868-1940) and Susan Mary ‘Lily’ Yeats (1866-
1949), sisters of William Butler Yeats, opened their first printing enterprise, the Dun Emer Press, as part of the multidisciplinary Irish craft centre Dun Emer. After the centre’s disbanding, the Yeats sisters continued publishing under the name Calua Press from 1908. They specialised in publishing new works by Irish writers, especially W. B. Yeats. The printing expertise for their endeavour was provided by Elizabeth Yeats, who had been trained at the Woman’s Printing Society in London, founded by the trade unionist and feminist Emma Paterson in 1876 ‘as part of a growing movement to open new areas of skilled employment to women’ (Crawford). The Calua Press supported this effort by employing local girls in its workshop and even training some of them as printers (Murray, p. 492).

St John’s earliest Calua Press publication is W. B. Yeats’s Reveries over Childhood and Youth published
in 1915. Yeats’s autograph inscription and the date ‘February 15, 1920’ is on the title-page next to the
woodcut designed by the artist and poet Thomas Sturge Moore, one of Yeats’s friends. The text is
accompanied by loose plates with reproductions of works of John B. Yeats, the father of Elizabeth,
Lily, and William: ‘Memory Harbour’ with a brief description of the painting as well a drawing of Mrs Yeats by her husband, and that of a watercolour self-portrait of John B. Yeats himself. The Calua Press volumes are part of the most significant recent donation to the Library, made by the lawyer and Irish literature scholar Dr Joseph Hassett.

Further Resource
This publication is discussed in the blog post about St John’s Private Press holdings available at our designated Special Collections website.