Olivia began hosting weekly salons frequented by Ezra Pound and other modernist writers and artists in 1909, and became influential in London literary society.

Olivia's father, Henry Tod Tucker, was born in Edinburgh and joined the British Indian Army as an ensign at age 16.

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.

[10][11] 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.

[11] Writing in The Last Courtly Lover, Gloria Kline suggests Olivia and Yeats began a friendship based on the discussion of literature and his willingness to review her work.

[17] Literary scholar Humphrey Carpenter writes that Yeats' impression of Olivia was one of a woman with "a profound culture, a knowledge of French, English, and Italian and seemed always at leisure.

[19] Kline believes the two began a friendship based on the discussion of literature; Yeats biographer Foster adds they were drawn together by a mutual interest in the occult.

[3] In August Yeats returned to Ireland, continuing his correspondence with Olivia, writing to her about Maud's recently giving birth to a daughter, Iseult.

[21] Yeats delayed visiting Olivia in London a month later; he instead tended to Johnson, who was involved in the Wilde case and descending into the alcoholism that would kill him.

Unsure of himself, he took another absence, during which he decided that if Maud was unattainable, or unavailable due to circumstances, he would have Olivia, writing "but after all if I could not get the woman I loved it would be a comfort for a little while to devote myself to another".

Although her husband had grounds to sue Yeats and consequently destroy his reputation, her best hope against complete ruin was Shakespear's strong dislike of public scenes.

[21] On 15 July 1895, Yeats and Olivia travelled to Kent to visit Valentine Fox; the trip Harwood says "would have been, emotionally speaking a highly charged outing".

[26] Yeats was ambivalent about Olivia despite the advice of the sponsors; with no money to support her, he suggested she seek a legal separation (instead of a divorce), sparing her social ostracism and financial ruin.

[29] Finally after a charged bed-buying session, with Yeats describing "an embarrassed conversation upon the width", and his nervousness preventing them at first from becoming lovers, he eventually wrote in January 1896, "at last she came to me in my thirtieth year .... and we had many days of happiness".

[30][note 1] Six months later Yeats had returned Ireland, and in August Olivia was visiting Valentine Fox with her husband where she received news of her father's death.

[28] To save money, the family often left London during the summer, to take long visits to relatives in the country, in particular her brother Henry Tucker.

[38] Records of Olivia's life resume through Dorothy's letters and diaries surrounding the arrival of the American poet Ezra Pound in London in 1909.

[46] In 1914, Olivia translated a grimoire for Yeats and Pound, who spent November 1913 to January 1914 in the countryside at Stone Cottage in Ashdown Forest—Pound acting as secretary to Yeats—researching the occult.

Hope Shakespear died on 5 July 1923; within months Olivia moved to an apartment in West Kensington, taking with her two maids who had been with the family for decades.

In a very real sense, according to Harwood, Olivia Shakespear is the "unsung heroine" of the modernist period, because much of the money Ezra Pound generously used to support struggling writers such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce came from her.

The day before her death she wrote in a letter to Dorothy: "On Monday I was taken suddenly ill with gall bladder trouble—awful pain—sent for Doctor Barnes—he gave me dope & an injection and pain gradually went ...

When she died she was a lovely old woman ... She came of a long line of soldiers and during the last war thought it her duty to stay in London through all the air raids.

Unterecker writes that Yeats made an effort to keep the correspondence private: "Shortly before his death he methodically destroyed a large group of letters to Olivia Shakespear.

Anne Margaret Daniel says that the story was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886), with the dilemma of good vs. evil translated here into that of an unattractive woman who longs for beauty.

In 2016, Valancourt Books published Daniel's edition of "Beauty's Hour", marking the first return to print of Shakespear's fiction for many decades.

The complicated plot—a mother and daughter struggle for "possession of the [father's] artistic soul"—shows hints of incestuous love, a theme found in her later work.

Like Rupert Armstrong, the plot of The Devotees depicts a mildly incestuous love: a young man and girl, raised together since childhood, devote themselves for decades to his drug-addicted mother before they marry.

Of Uncle Hilary Jane Eldridge Miller writes in Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism, and the Edwardian Novel, "Shakespear demonstrates the ways in which that ideal leads to disillusionment and resentment".

[63] Miller writes that in the novel Olivia explores "marriage laws, divorce, and bigamy", with a focus on the nature of romantic love—rejected in favour of spiritual and intellectual pursuits.

Miller writes that in Uncle Hilary Olivia examines issues such as marriage laws, divorce, and bigamy, while focusing on the nature of romantic love.