“Traditions of the Private House”

This chapter concerns primarily with the relation between eminent domain as a concept in public law and eminent domain as a metaphor for the complexities of poetic sovereignty in a increasingly transnational, and even global, context. Making even more explicit this Yeatsian parallel between aristocratic values and the concept of artistic sovereignty, Woolf—in a footnote—invokes "the traditions of the private house, that ancestral memory which lies behind the present moment". On the contrary, the very fact that Ellmann uses this phrase with such apparent casualness is, in and of itself, significant and revealing, especially given Ellmann's instrumental role in establishing modernist literature as a legitimate area of academic inquiry. The author refers to the arrangement by means of which, in March of that year, Lady Gregory's daughter-in-law Margaret sold Coole Park to the Irish Forestry Commission, a division of the Irish Free State's Ministry of Lands and Agriculture.