cousins not to join the military—who went on to become a poet and friend to W. B. Yeats. It is likely that Olivia received little formal education; she may have been educated by tutors, and appears to have become well-read as a young woman. In 1885 Olivia married Henry Hope Shakespear, a man described by Terence Brown in The Life of W.B. Yeats: A Critical Biography as "worthy" but "dull". Born in India in 1849, he was descended from 17th-century East London ropemakers and, like Olivia, came from a military family, although of less prestige and wealth than the Tuckers and Johnsons. Henry had attended Harrow, studied law, and joined a law practice in 1875. The couple were married on 8 December 1885, and honeymooned in Boulogne and Paris. Olivia's father endowed them with a comfortable income in the form of a trust. Nine months after the wedding their only child, Dorothy, was born on 14 September 1886; Olivia realised soon that the marriage was devoid of passion. Yeats' biographer Alexander Jeffares writes, "she was unselfcentered, unselfish, deeply imaginative and sympathetic and, until she met Yeats, she seems to have accepted the fact of her unhappy loveless marriage". Shakespear dissolved his legal partnership in the late 1880s—his partner may have been embezzling from clients' trusts—and formed his own practice. Harwood writes that Shakespear's attitude to the situation showed a certain amount of "timidity" on his part and a definite "dislike of scenes". During this period Olivia moved from socialising with military wives to literary women: Valentine Fox (unhappily married to a Kent brewer) and Pearl Craigie, a divorced American writer who published as John Oliver Hobbes. W. B. Yeats Friendship On 16 April 1894, accompanied by Pearl Craigie, Olivia attended a literary dinner to launch The Yellow Book, and was seated opposite W. B. Yeats. Recently returned from visiting Maud Gonne in Paris, Yeats was in London for the production of his play The Land of Heart's Desire. The two were not introduced that evening but Yeats, probably through Lionel Johnson (who became disruptively drunk at the dinner), enquired about the woman seated opposite. Yeats was deeply affected, later writing in his memoirs of the encounter: "I noticed opposite me .... a woman of great beauty ... She was exquisitely dressed ... and suggested to me an incomparable distinction." Soon after, Olivia attended a showing of The Land of Heart's