Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle of Friends

The life of a remarkable Adirondack woman (model, journalist, and poet) provides readers with a unique insider’s view–drawn from diaries and primary material published here for the first time–into art and literature during the birth of the Age of Modernism.

Jeanne Foster challenged the accepted role for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Born on a hardscrabble farm in the Adirondack Mountains in 1879, she was hailed as an important voice in American poetry by 1916 when her first books of verse, Neighbors of Yesterday and Wild Apples were published.

She had early success as a model–she was the Harrison Fisher girl of 1903–and later became a journalist for the American Review of Reviews. In 1918, she met John Quinn, patron of the arts, which placed her in the middle of some of the most important literary and artistic movements in the twentieth century. She counted among her friends John Butler and William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi. This book reveals her dark affair with Aleister Crowley and her great friendship with Tomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. Today, Jeanne Foster lies buried in Chestertown, New York, next to her old friend John Butler Yeats.