William Shortall selects Elizabeth Yeats’ dance card from the Cuala Press Archive at Trinity College Dublin
The Cuala Press Archive at Trinity College Dublin’s library holds information on the operation of Elizabeth Yeats’ printing enterprise and on her sister Lily’s embroidery business. The archive contains details on day-to-day decisions on publications, designs for prints, business meetings, financial woes and marketing strategies for the sale of books and art prints – which, on occasion, resorted to requesting divine intervention. Interspersed with the corporate is an occasional personal letter or item. One such item is a dance card that belonged to Elizabeth Corbet Yeats (1868–1940), dating from her life before the Dun Emer Guild and the Cuala Press. It acts as a harbinger for her life in service to the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. Dance cards were common throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries (awareness of these artifacts has been raised recently, as they feature prominently in the popular period drama Bridgerton). They contained a list of the dances for the evening and were a woman’s preserve – she pencilled in her partner for each dance at the start of the night to minimise the risk of ballroom embarrassment. They were mostly associated with high society.
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Isabella Evangelisti visits the MAC in Belfast, where the work of selected painting graduates from Belfast School of Art is on show
