Dorothy Pound née Shakespear

Dorothy Pound née Shakespear

Painter, illustrator and wife of Ezra Pound. Born in Paddington, her mother Olivia Shakespear was Yeats's one-time lover and Dorothy's introduction to literary London. Dorothy Shakespear met her future husband in 1909 and, after an engagement prolonged by her father's opposition, married Pound in 1914. The Pounds relocated to Paris in 1920 and, in 1925, settled in Rapallo, Italy. The following year, she gave birth to Omar Pound. An accomplished watercolourist, Dorothy contributed to the second issue of Blast (1915) and illustrated B. C. Windeler's Elimus: A Story (1923). She also designed several of Pound's book covers. A selection from fifty years of her drawings and watercolours was published as Etruscan Gate in 1971. Ronan Crowley