From 1888 to 1892 W.B.Yeats contributed a series of essays on literature and Irish folklore to two American newspapers, the Boston Pilot and Providence Sunday Journal. These important but little-known pieces show his intense engagement with current books, plays, personalities and controversies. They also make major statements about the issues of cultural nationalism and theatrical reform that preoccupied the poet. Newly edited, annotated, and introduced by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, Letters to the New Island offers a fresh glimpse of Yeats as an active polemicist, critic and all-round man of letters.

A gorgeously produced homage to the art of the letter, comprising letters to and from the Presidents of Ireland.

In 1822 Marianne Williams, with her missionary husband Henry and their three small children, left England forever. Their new home, in New Zealand's Bay of Islands, was a remote one-house settlement - the Church Missionary Society mission station headquarters. This was nearly twenty years before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Marianne's only contact with the outside world was in letters home to her family in Nottingham. It is through these letters that her story can be told. At a time when most women of her age and class were enjoying the luxuries of industrial England, Marianne Williams was living among warring Maori tribes with unruly whaling crews across the bay. With her husband often absent, she was nurse, midwife, and surrogate missionary in the community and coped with running the mission station and schools, providing hospitality to visiting European explorers - including Charles Darwin - and tending to her growing family of eleven children. Yet, despite these immense demands, in her letters the bravery and uncomplaining determination of this extraordinary woman shine through.