A Name, Reclaimed
Odd Sister is named for a pair of remarkable sisters the world mostly forgot. In Ireland, Elizabeth and Lily Yeats are remembered — if at all — as the "weird sisters," a scornful, throwaway line in James Joyce's Ulysses. The novel never even named them, just as history left them footnotes to somebody else's story.
From 1908 to 1940, the two ran Cuala Press together — Elizabeth at the hand-press, Lily at the embroidery frame — building a real craft business, page by page and stitch by stitch. But they were known chiefly as sisters of two famous brothers, the poet W.B. Yeats and the painter Jack Yeats, and spent their lives in that shadow, and in the shadow of one unkind word.
We borrowed their name and rewrote the insult: weird becomes odd, a word worth wearing proudly — a small, standing tribute to two women who worked with their hands and deserved far better than a punchline.
