1852–1932
Playwright and a significant participant in the Irish Literary Revival
Lady Augusta Gregory is most famous for her co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, alongside WB Yeats. Although the ‘Old Lady’, as she was universally known, generally worked behind the scenes, she played a major part in the resurgence of native culture that is now called the Irish Literary Revival. Without her practical and creative input, the work of some of Ireland’s greatest writers, such as WB Yeats, JM Synge, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey and George Bernard Shaw, might never have seen the light of day. Augusta was a hard worker all her life: she spent her youth dutifully looking after her brothers, her thirties as a high-caste social hostess, her forties as a folklorist and translator, and her fifties and sixties as a playwright and theatre director.
She was born Isabella Augusta Persse at Roxborough House, Loughrea, County Galway, the twelfth of her father’s sixteen children. She was the youngest and, according to her mother, the plainest daughter of the house. A family story tells how Mrs Persse, disappointed that the child was not a boy, threw a blanket over the new-born and proceeded to forget all about her until a servant noticed she was suffocating and rescued her.
The Persses were Anglo-Irish Ascendancy through and through, and Augusta’s family tree was bowing under the weight of lord lieutenants, sheriffs and viscounts. Despite this, Augusta, from her relatively lowly position on the edges of the household, acquired a mixed cultural identity. Virtually ignored by her own mother, Augusta’s real mother figure was her nurse, Mary Sheridan, who worked at Roxborough for forty years. In a house saturated with Orangeism, Unionism and strict Protestantism, young Augusta was reared by an Irish-speaking, folktale-telling, staunchly Catholic nationalist with rebel tendencies.
A quiet and dutiful little girl, Augusta was small and brown-eyed, shy and something of a loner. She tried to overcome this tendency in order to help Roxborough’s tenants; her biographer Elizabeth Coxhead noted that from her teens onwards she acted as a ‘voluntary social worker’ on the estate, doing what she could for the sick and the poor. Augusta was not interested in hunting, shooting and fishing and, in typical Big House style, she received schooling insufficient to fit her for anything else, so she tried to educate herself by reading widely. Her philanthropic and educational efforts were regarded by everyone – including herself – as subsidiary to her real job, which was to be available at all times to nurse the tubercular and alcoholic young men of the family.
Throughout her twenties, while her more beautiful sisters married and moved away, Augusta unstintingly and uncomplainingly did her duty: teaching Sunday school, helping local girls to sell embroidery, nursing first one brother then another. Then, at the relatively late age of twenty-eight, Augusta landed a marital catch that surprised everybody. In 1880 she met and married Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, thirty-five years her senior and seriously rich. The bride gained the security, status and independence she could never hope for at home, while the bridegroom gained a housekeeper for his homes in London and Coole, a companion who would not baulk at being a nurse, and ‘a good listener’.
Overnight, the short, dumpy, shy Augusta was transformed into the lady of the manor, with all the responsibilities that entailed. She immediately reverted to the most deeply ingrained habit of her life – service to the men around her. She merely replaced her brothers with her husband. In the future, she would replace her husband with her son, her nephew, the Abbey Theatre and all the greatest playwrights in Ireland.
The Gregory marriage was happy and produced a child, Robert, in May 1881. In 1892, after just twelve years together, Lady Gregory was widowed at the age of thirty-nine. She never remarried and wore black for the rest of her life. After her husband’s death she threw herself into the work of editing his memoirs.
Possibly the most important non-familial relationship of Lady Gregory’s life was with WB Yeats, whom she met in London in 1894 when the young poet had nothing to his name. The maternal Lady Gregory spotted Yeats’ genius straightaway and decided to help him. Yeats was grateful though somewhat nonplussed by her attentions, and saw her as ‘kind and able… but to what measure?’ Lady Gregory recognised what he did not: that creativity needed a place to flourish. Accordingly, she created a haven for Yeats at Coole Park every summer for many years. She looked after his health, gave him the best rooms in the house, took him for nature rambles, sent him nourishing soup to give him strength to come to breakfast, lent him money so he could give up his day job and offered valuable constructive advice on his work.
Many people cattily thought that the forty-three-year-old widow was looking for a handsome thirty-year-old husband, but this was never the case. She was a woman more passionate about Irish literature than about physical love, and Yeats, who described her as ‘mother, friend, sister and brother’, grew to depend on her advice regarding both his work and his problematic love life. ‘I doubt if I should have done much with my life,’ he wrote, ‘except for her firmness and care.’ ‘It is impossible to overestimate her influence on Yeats,’ wrote Micheál mac Liammóir, ‘she was his friend and counsellor, an understanding eye in the tumultuous and haunted places of his mind.’ Lady Gregory would never let him down.
One summer day in 1897, while visiting their friend, the landowner Edward Martyn, Lady Gregory and Yeats were inspired by the idea of setting up a national theatre to showcase new Irish drama. Lady Gregory immediately set about getting funding and publicity for the new venture, and Yeats started writing for it. The first incarnation of their brainchild was the Irish Literary Theatre, which produced plays from 1899 to 1901. The Irish Literary Theatre was replaced by the Irish National Theatre Society, which performed various works in different venues, including the unforgettable Cathleen ni Houlihan of 1902 with Maud Gonne in the lead role. The following year an English heiress named Miss Horniman agreed to subsidise the Society and refurbish a building for it. Accordingly, in late 1904 the Abbey Theatre opened on central Dublin’s Abbey Street. Lady Gregory, WB Yeats and JM Synge were the first directors.
Apart from Yeats’ friendship and the love of her son, Lady Gregory always cut a lonely figure, especially at the Abbey. One of her most exhausting and thankless tasks was fund-raising for the company, which put her in the invidious position of having to balance the nationalist elements in the Abbey with the mainly Unionist funders. She was always caught in the middle: nationalists distrusted her because of her background and title, while unionists distrusted her because they could see she was, in fact, a nationalist.
Although Lady Gregory’s personal qualities were sterling – she was unfailingly kind, courteous and committed – her manner was frequently off-putting. It was as if she were aware that there was an unbridgeable gap between herself and almost everyone she met through the Abbey. ‘She had a queenly way with her,’ said Gerard Fay; the ‘frosty dignity’ never left her manner, said Micheál mac Liammóir; she had a ‘Protestant high-school air,’ said George Moore; ‘she was a pleasant if rather condescending person, who treated us all rather as children,’ said leading lady Máire nic Shiubhlaigh. Yet Lady Gregory worked and worked for the people who thought she looked down on them. ‘She acted the part of a charwoman,’ wrote the notoriously difficult Sean O’Casey, one of the few working-class people who genuinely liked her, ‘but one with a star on her breast.’
As a consolation for her loneliness – and to make money – Lady Gregory wrote. Ever since her nursery days with Mary Sheridan she had been fascinated by Ireland’s folklore, and since the 1890s she had been actively researching her local area, Kiltarten, for stories. She published folklore collections – Cuchulainn of Muirthemne in 1902 and Gods and Fighting Men in 1904 – and then, to furnish the Abbey repertory company with material, she turned to writing plays.
Between 1900 and 1928 Lady Gregory experienced the most creative period of her life. In total she published some forty works of poetry and prose, including more than twenty plays, and she invented a dialect, Kiltartenese, that was to influence Irish playwrights for years to come. Her plays, both comedies and tragedies and all nationalist in tone, were successful, particularly Spreading the News (1904), The Rising of the Moon (1907) and The Workhouse Ward (1908). Despite their popularity, she was never considered to be in the first order of playwrights.
In 1911 Lady Gregory stepped out from behind Yeats and into the limelight when she alone took the Abbey company on tour to the USA. Nervously, she forced herself to complete public-speaking engagements, meet President Theodore Roosevelt and deal with the continuing controversy surrounding JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World. The furore around the play was such that there were riots in New York and Philadelphia. As one actress recalled, the ‘rotund, thin-lipped and very determined-looking’ fifty-nine-year-old widow used to conceal herself in parts of the set and hiss at the actors to ‘keep playing!’ One night she made the company perform the whole play again from the beginning because it could not be heard the first time due to the shouts of hecklers. Despite these hostile scenes the tour was a success, and Lady Gregory returned to Dublin in triumph.
But grief was just around the corner. With the outbreak of World War I, her only son, Robert, immediately joined the air-force. Against all the odds he survived until 1918, when his mother finally received the telegram she had been dreading for so long. Robert had been killed in action over France, leaving a wife and three children. Comparing herself to a machine, a heartbroken Lady Gregory did the only thing she could – she carried on working.
The post-war years were troubled times for Ireland. Avowedly anti-Home Rule in her youth, Lady Gregory moved toward what Micheál mac Liammóir called a ‘gently fervent patriotism’. The reprisal executions of fifteen rebel leaders after the Easter Rising of 1916 strengthened her nationalism. During the War of Independence and the Civil War, Lady Gregory was ostracised by her grander Galway neighbours and by her extended family because of her political inclinations – even though she made it plain she did not believe in violence and never allowed the Abbey to be used for propaganda plays. Meanwhile, she had to stand by as the IRA killed one of her own nephews and burnt down her beloved childhood home, Roxborough.
While others were bent on destruction, Lady Gregory strove to preserve Ireland’s cultural heritage for the Irish. She fought a bitter struggle to retrieve from London’s National Gallery an important collection of modern Irish paintings, known as the Lane Pictures, and have them housed in a new Dublin gallery. (The paintings are now co-owned by the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery at Charlemont House, Dublin, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.) In the 1920s her best success revolved around working with Sean O’Casey, whom she encouraged as she had Yeats thirty years earlier. Controversial as his plays were, she threw her weight behind them and Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) proved to be modern classics. She published her own last batch of plays in 1928, and then retired from the Abbey.
By now the energy of the seventy-six-year-old was failing. She had an operation for breast cancer in 1926, but lived on at Coole Park another six years. She died peacefully in her bed on 22 May 1932 at the age of eighty. Her house was demolished in 1941, but the grounds were preserved and visitors can still see the famous autograph tree, which bears the initials of some of those who visited and were indebted to Lady Gregory: George Bernard Shaw, JM Synge, Jack B Yeats, Sara Allgood, George Russell (Æ) and Sean O’Casey, among others.