A book one is reluctant to put down...[it is] compulsive reading because of its enigmas, the ever-varying rapport between this aloof Director of the Abbey Theatre...and the young 'changeling' of an actress...In a sense Molly was the co-author of the Playboy and Deirdre, since so much of her real and fancied spirit was written into the heroines she later presented on the stage, and because of the life-giving turbulence with which she recharged him.
   --Norman MacKenzie, Queen's Quarterly

[The letters] begin on a querulous note, turn to passion, to tenderness, to pathos, but in the end show us pretty much the whole man, who for genius ranks next to the man who befriended him, W. B. Yeats, and put him on the road to immortality.
   --Herbert Kenny, Boston Globe

This is a book to buy and to keep and to lend to no one: it is a very private and personal thing and too deeply moving, too heart-breakingly gauche, too clumsily painful to be shared.
   --Robin Skelton, Malahat Review

Ann Saddlemyer is Professor of English Literature, University of Victoria.