Augusta, Lady Gregory - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (15 March 1852 – 22 May 1932), born Isabella Augusta Persse, was an Irish

Irish people

The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...

dramatist and folklorist

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

. With William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

and Edward Martyn

Edward Martyn

Edward Martyn was an Irish political and cultural activist and playwright.-Early life:Martyn was the eldest son of John Martyn of Tullira and Annie Mary Josephine Smyth of Masonbrook, Loughrea, both in County Galway. He succeeded his father upon John's death in 1860...

, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre

Irish Literary Theatre

The Irish Literary Theatre was a precursor to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Founded by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore and Edward Martyn in 1899, this theatre presented a number of plays by the founders and other writers, including Padraic Colum....

and the Abbey Theatre

Abbey Theatre

The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...

, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology

Irish mythology

The mythology of pre-Christian Ireland did not entirely survive the conversion to Christianity, but much of it was preserved, shorn of its religious meanings, in medieval Irish literature, which represents the most extensive and best preserved of all the branch and the Historical Cycle. There are...

. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.

Lady Gregory is mainly remembered for her work behind the Irish Literary Revival

Irish Literary Revival

The Irish Literary Revival was a flowering of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century.-Forerunners:...

. Her home at Coole Park

Coole Park

Coole Park is a nature reserve of approximately operated by the Irish National Parks & Wildlife Service and is located a few miles west of Gort, County Galway, Ireland. The park contains extensive woodlands and a series of turloughs with 6 kilometres of signposted nature trails plus a formal...

, County Galway

County Galway

County Galway is a county in Ireland. It is located in the West Region and is also part of the province of Connacht. It is named after the city of Galway. Galway County Council is the local authority for the county. There are several strongly Irish-speaking areas in the west of the county...

, served as an important meeting place for leading Revival figures, and her early work as a member of the board of the Abbey was at least as important for the theatre's development as her creative writings. Lady Gregory's motto was taken from Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

: "To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people."

Early life and marriage

Lady Gregory was born the youngest daughter of the Anglo-Irish

Anglo-Irish

Anglo-Irish was a term used primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries to identify a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until...

landlord family Persse in Roxborough

Roxborough

Roxborough may refer to the following places:* Roxborough, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania* Roxborough Township, Pennsylvania* Roxborough State Park, Colorado* Roxborough State Park Archaeological District, Colorado* Roxborough Park, Colorado...

, County Galway

County Galway

. Her mother, Frances Barry, was related to Standish O'Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore

Standish O'Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore

The Rt. Hon. Standish O'Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore, PC , from Cahir Guillamore, County Limerick, served as Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer for Ireland for a number of years...

, and her family home, Roxborough, was a 6,000-acre (24 km²) estate, the big house of which was later burnt down during the Irish Civil War

Irish Civil War

The Irish Civil War was a conflict that accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State as an entity independent from the United Kingdom within the British Empire....

. She was educated at home, and her future career was strongly influenced by the family nurse (i.e. nanny

Nanny

A nanny, childminder or child care provider, is an individual who provides care for one or more children in a family as a service...

), Mary Sheridan, a Catholic and a native Irish speaker

Irish language

Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...

, who introduced the young Isabella Augusta Persse to the history and legends of the local area.

She married Sir William Henry Gregory

William Henry Gregory

Sir William Henry Gregory PC was an Anglo-Irish writer and politician.The only child of Robert Gregory and Elizabeth O'Hara Gregory, he was born at the Castle, in Dublin's Phoenix Park. From 1830 to 1835 he attended Harrow, where he was an award-winning student...

, a widower with an estate at Coole Park

Coole Park

, near Gort

Gort

Gort is a town in south County Galway in the west of Ireland. An Gort is the official Irish name for the town, as defined by the Placenames Commission. In spoken Irish, however, the town is known by its traditional name Gort Inse Guaire. It lies just north of the border with County Clare on the...

, County Galway, on 4 March 1880, at St Matthias church in Dublin. As the wife of a knight, she became entitled to be called "Lady Gregory". Sir William, who was 35 years older than his bride, had just retired from his position of Governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), having previously served several terms as Member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

for Galway County

Galway County (UK Parliament constituency)

The UK Parliament constituency of County Galway was an historic Irish constituency, comprised the whole of County Galway, except for the Borough of Galway. It replaced the pre-Act of Union Parliament of Ireland constituency...

. He was a well-educated man with many literary and artistic interests, and the house at Coole Park housed a large library and extensive art collection, both of which his bride was eager to explore. He also had a house in London, and the couple spent a considerable amount of time there holding a weekly salon

Salon (gathering)

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...

which was frequented by many of the leading literary and artistic figures of the day, including Robert Browning

Robert Browning

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.-Early years:...

, Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language....

, John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Early life:...

and Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

. Their only child, Robert Gregory, was born in 1881. He was killed while serving as a pilot during the First World War

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, an event that inspired Yeats's poems "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," and "Shepherd and Goatherd."

Early writings

The Gregorys travelled in Ceylon, India, Spain, Italy and Egypt. While in Egypt, Lady Gregory had an affair with the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was an English poet and writer. He was born at Petworth House in Sussex, and served in the Diplomatic Service from 1858 to 1869. His mother was a Catholic convert and he was educated at Twyford School, Stonyhurst and at St Mary's College, Oscott...

, during which she wrote a series of love poems, A Woman's Sonnets.

Her earliest work to appear under her own name was Arabi and His Household (1882), a pamphlet—originally a letter to The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

—in support of Ahmed Orabi Pasha, leader of what has come to be known as the Urabi Revolt

Urabi Revolt

The Urabi Revolt or Orabi Revolt , also known as the Orabi Revolution, was an uprising in Egypt in 1879-82 against the Khedive and European influence in the country...

, an 1879 Egyptian nationalist revolt against the oppressive regime of the Khedive

Khedive

The term Khedive is a title largely equivalent to the English word viceroy. It was first used, without official recognition, by Muhammad Ali Pasha , the Wāli of Egypt and Sudan, and vassal of the Ottoman Empire...

and European domination of Egypt. She later said of this booklet, "whatever political indignation or energy was born with me may have run its course in that Egyptian year and worn itself out". Despite this, in 1893 she published A Phantom's Pilgrimage, or Home Ruin, an anti-Nationalist pamphlet against William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS was a British Liberal statesman. In a career lasting over sixty years, he served as Prime Minister four separate times , more than any other person. Gladstone was also Britain's oldest Prime Minister, 84 years old when he resigned for the last time...

's proposed second Home Rule

Home rule

Home rule is the power of a constituent part of a state to exercise such of the state's powers of governance within its own administrative area that have been devolved to it by the central government....

Act.

She continued to write prose during the period of her marriage. During the winter of 1883, while her husband was in Ceylon, she worked on a series of memoirs of her childhood home with a view to publishing them under the title An Emigrant's Notebook, but this plan was abandoned. She wrote a series of pamphlets in 1887 called Over the River, in which she appealed for funds for the parish of St. Stephens in Southwark

Southwark

Southwark is a district of south London, England, and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Southwark. Situated east of Charing Cross, it forms one of the oldest parts of London and fronts the River Thames to the north...

, south London. She also wrote a number of short stories in the years 1890 and 1891, although these also never appeared in print. A number of unpublished poems from this period have also survived. When Sir William Gregory died in March 1892, Lady Gregory went into mourning and returned to Coole Park where she edited her husband's autobiography, which she published in 1894. She was to write later, "If I had not married I should not have learned the quick enrichment of sentences that one gets in conversation; had I not been widowed I should not have found the detachment of mind, the leisure for observation necessary to give insight into character, to express and interpret it. Loneliness made me rich—'full', as Bacon says."

Cultural nationalism

A trip to Inisheer

Inisheer

Inisheer is the smallest and most eastern of the three Aran Islands in Galway Bay, Ireland.-Naming:The official name, , was brought into usage by the Ordnance Survey Ireland. It may be a compromise between the traditional local name and the previous official name . There is no Irish word...

in the Aran Islands

Aran Islands

The Aran Islands or The Arans are a group of three islands located at the mouth of Galway Bay, on the west coast of Ireland. They constitute the barony of Aran in County Galway, Ireland...

in 1893 reawoke an interest in the Irish language and in the folklore of the area in which she lived. She organised Irish lessons at the school at Coole and began collecting tales from the area around her home, especially from the residents of Gort workhouse

Workhouse

In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment...

. This activity led to the publication of a number of volumes of folk material, including A Book of Saints and Wonders (1906), The Kiltartan History Book (1909), and The Kiltartan Wonder Book (1910). She also produced a number of collections of "Kiltartanese" versions of Irish myths, including Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904). ("Kiltartanese" is Lady Gregory's term for English with Gaelic syntax, based on the dialect spoken in Kiltartan

Kiltartan

Kiltartan is a barony in County Galway, Ireland. It was formerly known as Cenél Áeda na hEchtge. It was the home of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and a regular residence of W.B. Yeats.It is alluded to in Yeats's poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death....

.) In his introduction to the former, Yeats wrote "I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time." James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

was to parody this claim in the Scylla and Charybdis

Scylla and Charybdis

Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology. Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express the same meaning of "having to choose between two evils".-The myth and...

chapter of his novel Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

.

Towards the end of 1894, encouraged by the positive reception of the editing of her husband's autobiography, Lady Gregory turned her attention to another editorial project. She decided to prepare selections from Sir William Gregory's grandfather's correspondence for publication as Mr Gregory’s Letter-Box 1813–30 (1898). This entailed researching Irish history of the period, and one outcome of this work was a shift in her own position from the 'soft' Unionism of her earlier writing on Home Rule to a definite support of Irish nationalism

Irish nationalism

Irish nationalism manifests itself in political and social movements and in sentiment inspired by a love for Irish culture, language and history, and as a sense of pride in Ireland and in the Irish people...

and Republicanism

Irish Republicanism

Irish republicanism is an ideology based on the belief that all of Ireland should be an independent republic.In 1801, under the Act of Union, the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...

and what she was later to describe as "a dislike and distrust of England".

Founding of the Abbey

Edward Martyn

was a neighbour of Lady Gregory, and it was during a visit to his Tullira Castle that she first met W. B. Yeats. Discussions between the three of them over the following year or so led to the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. Lady Gregory undertook fundraising, and the first programme consisted of Martyn’s The Heather Field and Yeats's The Countess Cathleen. During this period, she effectively co-authored Yeats's early plays, including The Countess Cathleen, specifically working on the passages of dialogue involving peasant characters.

The Irish Literary Theatre project lasted until 1901, when it collapsed due to lack of funding. In 1904, Lady Gregory, Martyn, Yeats, John Millington Synge

John Millington Synge

Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre...

, Æ

George William Russell

George William Russell who wrote under the pseudonym Æ , was an Irish nationalist, writer, editor, critic, poet, and painter. He was also a mystical writer, and centre of a group of followers of theosophy in Dublin, for many years.-Organisor:Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh...

, Annie Horniman

Annie Horniman

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman CH was an English theatre patron and manager. She established the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and founded the first regional repertory theatre company in Britain at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. She encouraged the work of new writers and playwrights, including...

and William

William Fay

William George Fay was an actor and theatre producer who was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre....

and Frank Fay

Frank Fay (Irish actor)

Frank Fay , brother of William Fay, was an actor and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. He worked with his brother, William, staging productions in halls around the city. Finally, they formed W. G...

came together to form the Irish National Theatre Society. The first performances staged by the society took place in a building called the Molesworth Hall. When the Hibernian Theatre of Varieties

Mechanics' Theatre

The Mechanics' Hall, also known as the Hibernian Theatre of Varieties was a theatre and music hall in Lower Abbey Street, Dublin. It stood at the site of the current Abbey Theatre at 26 Lower Abbey Street....

in Lower Abbey Street and an adjacent building in Marlborough Street became available, Horniman and William Fay agreed to their purchase and refitting to meet the needs of the society.

On 11 May 1904, the society formally accepted Horniman's offer of the use of the building. As Horniman was not normally resident in Ireland, the Royal Letters Patent required were paid for by her but granted in the name of Lady Gregory. One of her own plays, Spreading the News
Spreading the News
Spreading the News is a short one-act comic play by Lady Gregory, which she wrote for the opening night of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, 27 Dec. 1904. It was on a double bill with William Butler Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Audiences may have dozed through Yeats's play , but Spreading the News was...

was performed on the opening night, 27 December 1904. At the opening of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World
The Playboy of the Western World
The Playboy of the Western World is a three-act play written by Irish playwright John Millington Synge and first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on January 26, 1907. It is set in Michael James Flaherty's public house in County Mayo during the early 1900s...

in January 1907, a significant portion of the crowd rioted, causing the remainder of the performances to be acted out in dumbshow

Dumbshow

Dumbshow, also dumb show or dumb-show, is a traditional term for pantomime in drama, actions presented by actors onstage without spoken dialogue. It is similar to the masque...

. Lady Gregory did not think as highly of the play as Yeats did, but she defended Synge as a matter of principle. Her view of the affair is summed up in a letter to Yeats where she wrote of the riots: "It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't."

Later career

Lady Gregory remained an active director of the theatre until ill health led to her retirement in 1928. During this time she wrote more than 19 plays, mainly for production at the Abbey. Many of these were written in an attempted transliteration of the Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English is the dialect of English written and spoken in Ireland .English was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of the late 12th century. Initially it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country...

dialect spoken around Coole Park that became widely known as Kiltartanese, from the nearby village of Kiltartan

Kiltartan

. Her plays had been among the most successful at the Abbey in the earlier years, but their popularity declined. Indeed, the Irish writer Oliver St John Gogarty once wrote "the perpetual presentation of her plays nearly ruined the Abbey". In addition to her plays, she wrote a two-volume study of the folklore of her native area called Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland in 1920. She also played the lead role in three performances of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in 1919.

During her time on the board of the Abbey, Coole Park remained her home and she spent her time in Dublin staying in a number of hotels. At the time of the 1911 national census for example, she was staying in a hotel at 16 South Frederick Sreet. In these, she ate frugally, often on food she brought with her from home. She frequently used her hotel rooms to interview would-be Abbey dramatists and to entertain the company after opening nights of new plays. She spent many of her days working on her translations in the National Library of Ireland

National Library of Ireland

The National Library of Ireland is Ireland's national library located in Dublin, in a building designed by Thomas Newenham Deane. The Minister for Arts, Sport & Tourism is the member of the Irish Government responsible for the library....

. She gained a reputation as being a somewhat conservative figure. For instance, when Denis Johnston

Denis Johnston

Denis Johnston was an Irish writer. He wrote mostly plays, but also works of literary criticism, a book-length biographical essay of Jonathan Swift, a memoir and an eccentric work of philosophy. He also worked as a war correspondent, and as both a radio and television producer for the BBC...

submitted his first play Shadowdance to the Abbey, it was rejected by Lady Gregory and returned to the author with "The Old Lady says No" written on the title page. Johnson decided to rename the play, and The Old Lady Says 'No' was eventually staged by the Gate Theatre in 1928.

Retirement and death

When she retired from the Abbey board, Lady Gregory returned to live in Galway, although she continued to visit Dublin regularly. The house and demesne

Demesne

In the feudal system the demesne was all the land, not necessarily all contiguous to the manor house, which was retained by a lord of the manor for his own use and support, under his own management, as distinguished from land sub-enfeoffed by him to others as sub-tenants...

at Coole Park had been sold to the Irish Forestry Commission

Coillte Teoranta

Coillte is a state-sponsored company in the Republic of Ireland, based in Newtownmountkennedy. Coillte is a commercial company operating in forestry, land-based businesses and added-value processing operations....

in 1927, with Lady Gregory retaining life tenancy. Her Galway home had long been a focal point for the writers associated with the Irish Literary Revival and this continued after her retirement. On a tree in what were the grounds of the now demolished house, one can still see the carved initials of Synge, Æ, Yeats and his artist brother Jack, George Moore, Sean O'Casey

Seán O'Casey

Seán O'Casey was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.- Early life:...

, George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

, Katharine Tynan

Katharine Tynan

Katharine Tynan was an Irish-born writer, known mainly for her novels and poetry. After her marriage in 1898 to the writer and barrister Henry Albert Hinkson she usually wrote under the name Katharine Tynan Hinkson...

and Violet Martin. Yeats wrote five poems about or set in the house and grounds: "The Wild Swans at Coole", "I walked among the seven woods of Coole", "In the Seven Woods", "Coole Park, 1929" and "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931".

The woman Shaw once described as "the greatest living Irishwoman" died at home aged 80 from breast cancer, and is buried in the New Cemetery in Bohermore

Bohermore

Bohermore is located in the area of Galway city, Ireland. The name is derived form the Irish literally meaning "the big road".There is a large cemetery located in Bohermore known as the 'new cemetery'. The cemetery contains two mortuary chapels, one Catholic and the other Protestant...

, County Galway

County Galway

. The entire contents of Coole Park were auctioned three months after her death and the house demolished in 1941.

Her plays fell out of favour after her death and are now rarely performed. Many of the diaries and journals she kept for most of her adult life have been published, providing a rich source of information on Irish literary history during the first three decades of the 20th century.

External links

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Early life and marriage

Early writings

Cultural nationalism

Founding of the Abbey

Later career

Retirement and death

Further reading

External links