Lily and Lolly: The Forgotten Yeats Sisters, review: a celebration of female talent – and Irishness
Lily and Lolly: The Forgotten Yeats Sisters (Sky Arts) is billed as “the incredible story of two remarkable women”, which is a bit hyperbolic, but it’s International Women’s Day so let’s be generous. The pair – christened Susan and Elizabeth when they were born in the 1860s – lived in the shadow of their brothers, the poet William Butler Yeats and the artist Jack Butler Yeats, and their father, portraitist John Butler Yeats. That’s a lot of talent in one family.
The sisters also pursued careers in the arts, Lily as an embroideress for William Morris and Lolly as an art teacher, but they still saw it as their duty to look after the men. In the 1900s, they set up a press, Cuala, and an embroidery workshop, both of which trained and employed only women.
This was trailblazing stuff, although the family ties no doubt helped: the press published William, and Jack contributed designs. But the women’s own creative endeavours were strikingly beautiful, such as the altar tapestries in a church in Dublin.
This guide to their lives is hosted by Imelda May, the Irish singer, whose approach was so unlike that of your usual documentary presenter that it is both refreshing and disconcerting. May is open when it comnes to her passion for the sisters. “Oh my heart,” she whispers tearily, on seeing a rare photograph of Lolly in her later years.
The film is as much a celebration of Irishness as it is of women. Nor do the sisters fit into a neat box when it comes to the International Women’s Day tie-in – they would not have considered themselves feminists, one academic says.
But Lily once poured out her frustrations in a letter: “The mistake with my life has been that I have not had a woman’s life, but an uncomfortable and unsatisfactory mixture of a man’s and a woman’s. Gone out all day earning my living, working like a man for a woman’s pay, then kept house… In my next incarnation, I hope I will be all woman and have a woman’s life.”
If the film feels slight at times, it does achieve its aim of highlighting the sisters’ work and showing us that the Yeats talent was not confined to its men.
Lily and Lolly: The Forgotten Yeats Sisters is available to stream on NOW and airs on Sky Arts tonight at 8pm