Four days after her marriage to the 52-year-old poet W.B. Yeats, George Hyde-Lees began to have some strange experiences. Spirits from another world spoke through her when she was unconscious. They even made her write down their messages and give them to the middle-aged man she had just married. She, like everyone who knew him, was well aware of why Yeats had married so late in life. For over twenty years he had been desperately in love with another woman, Maude Gonne. But by 1917 Yeats finally decided to give up and marry someone else before he was too old to transmit his heritage to a new generation. His wife's automatic writing thrilled Yeats and turned what promised to be a tedious honeymoon into an exiting adventure that the couple shared for many years to come. The resulting messages were organized and published by Yeats as his seminal work of philosophy, A Vision.

What is striking to an outside observer is how similar the messages sent from the spirit world were to Yeats's previous ideas and theories. For Yeats, this similarity simply confirmed that he had, independently, stumbled onto the truth about the cyclic nature of history and of life in general. One might ask, however, whether the spirits were speaking the truth, or whether Yeats had already invented that truth and brought it back to himself by means of an intelligent new bride determined to dispel the memory of an old love and ensure her own future happiness.