George William Russell (10 April 1867 - 17 July 1935) who wrote with the pseudonym AE (sometimes written AE or A. E.), was an Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist. He was also a writer on mysticism, and a central figure in the group of devotees of theosophy which met in Dublin for many years. His first book of poems, Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894), established him in what was known as the Irish Literary Revival, where AE met the young James Joyce in 1902 and introduced him to other Irish literary figures, including William Butler Yeats. He appears as a character in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, where he dismisses Stephen’s theories on Shakespeare.