Dorothy Shakespear

Dorothy Shakespear (14 September 1886 – 8 December 1973) was the wife of the poet Ezra Pound, the daughter of novelist Olivia Shakespear and an artist. She participated in the Vorticism movement, and had her artwork published in the literary magazine BLAST.

Dorothy met Ezra Pound in 1909; after a long courtship the two were married in 1914. The couple moved to Paris in 1920, living there until 1924, when they moved to Rapallo, Italy. Dorothy stayed married to Pound in spite of his long-lasting affair with Olga Rudge whom he met in Paris in the early 1920s. In 1926 Dorothy gave birth to her son Omar Pound, whom she sent to England to be raised by her mother. By the 1930s, she became financially independent, the result of various family bequests, but lost much of her money following Pound's advice to invest in Benito Mussolini's fascist regime.

Toward the end of World War II, Dorothy and Pound were evacuated from their home in Rapallo, and for a period she, Pound and Rudge lived together in Rudge's home. After the war, when Pound had been arrested for treason and incarcerated on grounds of insanity in Washington, D.C., she moved there to visit him regularly, assumed control of his estate, and stayed with him until his release. They returned to Italy in 1958; in the 1960s she moved to London, leaving her husband to live out the last decade of his life with Olga Rudge.