Sanderson holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. In this essay, she looks at how Yeats's supernatural experiences and stories in Autobiographies relate to his desire for a unified mythology and national literature for the Irish people.

Yeats's fondness for myths and legends is well known and much appreciated. Seamus Heaney addressed this issue inThe Atlantic, acknowledging Yeats's efforts to create a unified cultural identity for Ireland based on stories and myths. From his youth, Yeats was deeply involved in "creating a vision of Ireland as an independent cultural entity, a state of mind as much as a nation-state, one founded on indigenous myths and attitudes and beliefs," noted Heaney.

Yeats's Autobiographies, a collection of essays written and published as individual pieces before his death in 1939, deals not only with his interest in traditional Irish rural myths and...