In his excellent obituary of William Trevor (22 November), the late Peter Porter wrote that Trevor “was not of the Protestant Ascendancy and resembled George Bernard Shaw and Seán O’Casey more than he did WB Yeats”. But while Yeats did not, like Shaw and Casey, come from the Protestant lower middle-class of Dublin, which has vanished almost without trace, he was not of the Ascendancy either. He may have identified with that old landed caste, but he didn’t belong to it, coming as he did from the commercial and professional Protestant bourgeoisie, which itself hasn’t much flourished in southern Ireland over the past hundred years. Hence his highly conflicted attitude to Irish nationalism, which turned out to threaten his own class even more than the old oligarchy.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Bath
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