An elderly Lady Gregory standing alone in a field wearing all black

Introducing Lady Gregory

Transcript below

Hear curator James Pethica introduce Lady Gregory

Run time eight and a half minutes

Lady Gregory was born in 1852 as Augusta Persse at Roxborough, a rural estate in Co. Galway, Ireland. Neither her father, known as a harsh landlord, nor her mother, a proselytizing evangelical protestant, was liked by their tenantry, and Lady Gregory would later characterize Roxborough as an insular and almost feudal place to have grown up. As the youngest and plainest daughter of 16 children in a resolutely male-centered household, she was little encouraged and received only sporadic homeschooling. With only modest social opportunities, she devoted her early adult life to local philanthropy and to caring for a sick brother.

Then, in 1880, at the age of 28, when it must have seemed likely she would remain a spinster, she married Sir William Gregory of neighboring Coole Park. Gregory who had recently retired as governor of Ceylon, was 35 years her senior, but highly regarded for his cultivation and personability. Wanting a companion for his declining years, he saw the bookish and earnest Augusta Persse as a good choice. The marriage transformed her life, introducing her to prominent literary, artistic, and political circles in London—where they lived part of each year—to extensive foreign travel, and to status as Dame of Coole. She flourished in her new milieu, quickly earning a reputation as a hostess and conversationalist.

Her 12 years of marriage were, she acknowledged, a “liberal education,” but they were also confiningly conventional in many respects. As a late Victorian woman she followed Gregory's interests dutifully and had to endure repeated separations from their one child, Robert, to satisfy her husband's love of travel. While in Egypt during the winter of 1881–82 the Gregorys joined with the charismatic poet and anti-imperialist, Wilfrid Blunt, in championing the cause of the Egyptian nationalist leader Ahmed Arabi. This led to a brief clandestine affair with Blunt in 1882–83—an infidelity Lady Gregory felt lasting guilt for—but it also led to her first publication, an essay about Arabi. Encouraged by Sir William, she continued to write sporadically over the next decade, but never finding a sustained or clear focus for most of what she produced in those years. Three short stories written around 1890 show her just beginning to take the people and life of the Galway countryside around her as her subject.

Sir William's death in 1892 left her a single mother at 39, and she resolutely set out to remake her life. When W.B. Yeats came to stay as a guest of her neighbor in 1896, she sought him out and asked if he could set her to some work for the burgeoning Irish literary movement. Their friendship was cemented when she began folklore gathering with and for him, and she quickly became his patron, supporter, amanuensis and closest friend. Yeats used her folklore gatherings in his essays and in the expanded 1902 edition of The Celtic Twilight, and she helped him make his hope of establishing an Irish theater movement by offering a first monetary guarantee for productions and by persuading friends to underwrite the remainder needed. The Irish Literary Theatre duly put on seasons of plays in Dublin in 1899, 1900, and 1901, and paved the way for the founding in 1904 of the Abbey Theatre—later Ireland’s National Theatre—of which Lady Gregory became patent holder and co-director. 

The partnership with Yeats also galvanized her own creativity. She published a redaction of the Irish Ulster cycle legends as Cuchulain of Muirthemne in 1902, using a style of English that drew on the syntactical forms of Irish speech. This was fulsomely praised by Yeats as the best Irish book of his time, and it became a vital imaginative source for him, as did her 1904 volume Gods and Fighting Men, a retelling of the Fenian cycle Irish legends.

More surprising, perhaps, was Lady Gregory's sudden emergence, at the age of 50, as a dramatist. Having assisted Yeats secretarially on his plays, she gradually assumed ever greater direct responsibility in his work, co-authoring Cathleen ni Houlihan with him in 1901 and then contributing substantially to all his other non-verse plays of that decade. Yeats initially sought her help merely to supply peasant dialogue and realist folk details to offset his own tendency to symbolism, but their creative exchanges quickly developed into a more complex stylistic, ideological, and imaginative interdependence. Claiming that more plays, and particularly comedies, were needed for the theater, she also wrote some three dozen plays of her own between 1902 and 1927, displaying particular skill with tightly constructed one-act dramas. Comedies such as Spreading the News became staples at the Abbey as short companion pieces for longer works of peasant realism or tragedy, but her most powerful one-act plays are typically those in which a political component animates the action, such as The Rising of the Moon, The Workhouse Ward, and The Gaol Gate.

Styled “the charwoman of the Abbey” by George Bernard Shaw, she became a tenacious champion of the Abbey Theatre, campaigning for funds, touring with and promoting the Abbey company in England and America, and encouraging young writers. Sean O'Casey credited her encouragement and advice as crucial to his emergence as a writer, though their close friendship was permanently damaged by the Abbey's rejection of his play The Silver Tassie in 1928. Gregory’s 1913 history, Our Irish Theatre, though somewhat self-serving and partisan, powerfully conveys her tactical shrewdness and determination, especially in defending the theater during crises such as when John Synge's work The Playboy of the Western World provoked rioting at the Abbey in 1907.

The death of her nephew Sir Hugh Lane on the Lusitania in 1915 and her son Robert’s death as an airman on the Italian front in 1918 were losses from which Lady Gregory never recovered. Her subsequent “wonder’ plays take on fantastic and otherworldly mythic structures as their subject matter, and a mystical and religious element becomes more pronounced in late plays such as The Story Brought by Brigit (1924) and Dave (1927). Yeats's marriage in 1917 also inevitably reduced her long-held position of primacy in his life. 

During the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21, and the civil war which followed, she was a horrified but perceptive spectator at Coole Park, recording events in her substantial Journals published in 1978 and 1987. Unlike many Irish “big houses,” Coole was not burned down during these troubled times, but land reform had by the 1920s reduced the estate's viability, and Coole was now legally owned by Robert's widow, who didn’t want to retain it. In 1927, the estate was sold to the Irish forestry department, with Lady Gregory remaining as a tenant in the house for life. Determined not to risk a fall-off in the quality of her work, she published her Last Plays in 1928, reserving her final energies for her memoir Coole (1931), an elegy for the Gregory family, Coole Park, and her own part in its creative fame.

During her last year of life, recognizing that she was failing, Yeats spent most of his time with her. His elegies “Coole Park, 1929” and “Coole and Ballylee, 1931” would be his most elaborate celebrations of their long partnership, her formidable character, and powerful influence. She had operations for breast cancer in 1923, 1926, and 1929, but thereafter declined further surgery, enduring increasing pain and disability over her last two years of life, and refusing to the end to take any pain-killing drugs that might affect her mind. She died at Coole in May 1932, and was buried in Galway city. Her gravestone reads simply “Lady Gregory,” giving her birth and death dates, but no indication of her literary life, her lineage, or her marriage. Below this is a line adapted from Cathleen ni Houlihan, the most successful play to result from her many years of collaboration with Yeats: “She shall be remembered for ever.”

End of Transcript