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  • Section 8: Blessed Bridget O'Coole
typed journal entry with some handwritten corrections

"the theatres may tremble”

typed draft of poem with handwritten corrections

"Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931"

Typescript journal entry with manuscript edits

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) Typed journal entry September 2, 1926 Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Lady Gregory's journal

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)
Typed journal entry
September 2, 1926

After discovering a lump in one breast, Gregory underwent a mastectomy in June 1923. She had only local anesthesia and during the procedure managed to converse with her surgeon (poet Oliver St. John Gogarty, who was the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) until she fainted. “Yeats so good to me through the bad days,” she noted in her journal. During a second surgery in 1926, again without chloroform, she noted, “the knife working about made me feel queer,” and she fixed her mind on the flow of the river joining her childhood home and Coole, like the arterial flow of her own blood. A third operation in 1929 failed to halt the spread of the cancer that killed her, though publicly she complained only of rheumatism.

: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

: Lady Gregory collection of papers

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Items in Section 8: Blessed Bridget O'Coole

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  • Black and white photo of Lady Gregory standing in a field, wearing all black

    Section 8: Blessed Bridget O'Coole Introduction

  • typed journal entry with some handwritten corrections

    "the theatres may tremble”

  • Typescript journal entry with manuscript edits

    Cancer

  • typed draft of poem with handwritten corrections

    "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931"

  • title page of book with illustration of tree

    Coole

  • Typed will codicil with annotations

    Codicil to Will

  • Mansucript letter from Lady Gregory to W.B. Yeats on Coole Park letter head

    Farewell letter to W. B. Yeats

  • Black and white photo of Lady Gregory standing in a field, wearing all black

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