Augusta, Lady Gregory

Isabella Augusta Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. She co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre. Her conversion to cultural nationalism was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime. She is mainly remembered for her work behind theIrish Literary Revival.

About Augusta, Lady Gregory in brief

Isabella Augusta Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. She co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Her conversion to cultural nationalism was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime. She married Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower with an estate at Coole Park, near Gort, on 4 March 1880 in St Matthias’ Church, Dublin. Their only child, Robert Gregory, was born in 1881. He was killed during the First World War while serving as a pilot, an event which inspired W. B. Yeats’s poems \”An Irish Airman Foresees His Death\”, \”In Memory of Major Robert Gregory\” and “Shepherd and Goatherd’”. 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, during which she wrote a series of love poems, A Woman’s Sonnets. She was to write later, ‘If I had not married I should not have learned the quick enrichment that gets one in conversation; had I not found the detachment of mind necessary to give insight into character, to interpret it and interpret it.’ She also wrote short stories in the years 1890 and 1891, although these also never appeared in print, although they also survived from this period.

Her motto was taken from Aristotle: ‘To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people’. She is mainly remembered for her work behind theIrish Literary Revival. Her home at Cooles Park in County Galway 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 as her creative writings for that theatre’s development. In 1893 she published A Phantom’s Pilgrimage, or Home Ruin, an anti-Nationalist pamphlet against William Ewart Gladstone’s proposed second Home Rule Act. In 1894 she edited her husband’s autobiography, which she published in 1894 under the title An Emigrant’s Notebook, but this plan was abandoned. She later went into mourning and died in March 1892, when Sir William Gregory died in 1892. Her husband had just retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon, having previously served several terms as Member of Parliament for CountyGalway. He also had a house in London, where the couple spent a considerable amount of time, holding weekly salons frequented by many leading literary and artistic figures of the day, including Robert Browning.

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