Happy Birthday Lady Gregory

Isabella Augusta Persse was born at Roxborough, County Galway, the youngest daughter of an Anglo-Irish landlord, on 15th March 1852 . Lady Gregory is best known for her renditions of Irish myths and legends and for founding the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with W.B. Yeats.

After marrying Sir William Gregory of Coole Park at the age of 28, she and her husband, who was 35 years her senior, spent a lot of time travelling. When not travelling, they resided in their house in London most of the time, where they held literary salons.

After her husband's death in 1892, Lady Gregory started to spend more time in Coole Park where she entertained many people of importance in relation to the Irish Literary Revival. Among others, W.B. Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Russell, J.M. Synge, Seán O'Casey and Douglas Hyde visited her in Coole. 

Lady Gregory, Yeats and Martyn co-founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904. She co-authored, Cathleen Ní Houlihan, with Yeats, which shows that she took a nationalist stance, once she was involved with the Irish Literary Revival, but not on a political level. This had not always been her position. When Lady Gregory and her husband were in Egypt in 1882, they assisted the writer and traveller Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in his support for Ahmed Urabi Bey against the Anglo-French occupation. 

Her position on the nationalist side in Egypt, in an albeit weak political role, stands in contradiction to her sympathies in her home country at the time. When Gladstone introduced the second Home Rule bill in 1893, Lady Gregory wrote a pamphlet titled, A Phantom's Pilgrimage, which she published anonymously.

In it she describes how Gladstone  emerges from his grave ten years after the bill had come into force and is unable to find praise for the changes Home Rule has brought the population. This may be more due to her concern for the disadvantaged, however, rather than a fear for her own position in society.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Lady Gregory wrote books retelling Irish myths and legends and the lives of Irish saints. She had been collecting the legends of the west of Ireland and translated them into the Kiltartan dialect, named for the area around Kiltartan in Co. Galway.

In 1904 she published, Seven Short Plays, all one-act plays, and she wrote many more, which were performed on the Abbey stage. In 1913 she published, Our Irish Theatre, in which she writes about the first years of the Abbey Theatre, including the American tours of the Abbey Players.

In the last years of her life, she invested much time and energy in the search for a suitable location for the art collection of her nephew Hugh Lane, who had been killed when his ship, the Lusitania, was torpedoed in 1915. In this she was unsuccessful. Read more about her. 

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