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“Augusta Gregory . . was one of the first Irish aristocrats to make the link between the Irish case and the wider challenge posed by the anti-colonial world. At first, she sympathized with distant rebels in Egypt and India, only later to make the scandalized discovery that the trouble-makers at her estate gates [in Galway] were hardly very different. That recognition led to her transformation from a colonial wife to an independent modern woman; and, in the course of that transformation, she emerged as a major artist,” asserted Professor Declan Kiberd, in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995). One of the significant literary visitors from Ireland to St. Paul and Minneapolis and its Women’s Club in February, 1915, lecturing on Irish folklore to Minnesota audiences, Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory (1852-1932), a unique figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance, grew up in a privileged, late Victorian Anglo-Irish household.
Impacted by the warm personality of her Irish language speaking nurse, Mary Sheridan, she pushed against the Unionism of her background and acquired a determined interest in Gaelic folklore and cultural heritage. Against long odds and defying the constraints of her epoch, she created a remarkable life and career for herself characterized by a prolific output of plays, books, and articles. The wit and shrewd characterization of her dramas has seen her compared to Molière, and recent feminist scholarship has emphasized her role as a collaborator and co-author with William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) so much so that she is now credited with co-authorship of Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), revising his claim to solo authorship.
She was born on March 15, 1852 in Galway, Ireland, the ninth of thirteen children in the Persse family, and the youngest daughter. Her cold, conventional mother, hoping for a boy, ignored the infant, who nearly died. But Augusta was born on the Ides of March, which later made her feel destined for more than just knowing her place and serving her brothers. Her autocratic father and evangelical Church of Ireland mother, part of the prosperous Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class, presided over their estate, Roxborough. Augusta grew up with a love of its river and hillsides, and it was the source of her Irish patriotism. Later, she would spend royalties from her plays planting trees at Coole Park, her husband’s nearby estate.
Augusta and her sisters were not sent to school, and acquired thin educations from a succession of incompetent governesses. She was a quiet introvert, drawn to reading and liiterature. The woman who had the greatest influence on her was her nanny, Mary Sheridan, who told the children Irish fairy stories and tales from 1798 French landing and United Irishmen rebellion. A lonely, ignored child, Augusta formed affectionate relationships with the country people who worked on the estate.
Denied the usual coming-out party in Dublin as the youngest daughter, in her twenties, Augusta was stuck with chaperoning her tubercular brother Richard on trips to Cannes, where she managed to discover Italy and Dante, and was expected to help her brother Algernon run the estate for Dudley, the oldest son and heir, an alcoholic. She watched as her older, prettier sister Adelaide married for love—a impecunious curate whom the family disapproved of—and the goodwill between the couple later crumbled as their illusions about each other faded. Augusta concluded that marrying for love was not necessarily wise.
In 1880, she married Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, Galway, a former MP and governor of Ceylon. He was paternalistic, self-absorbed, yet cultured and intelligent. He was 64 and a wealthy widower. Augusta was 28. She entered the London social whirl and learned to hold her own at dinner parties, employing her Irish wit with the likes of Henry James and Robert Browning. In summers, it was back to Coole Park, where she read books and cared for the elderly and work house orphans. Within months after the wedding, Augusta became pregnant. Their only child Robert was born on May 20, 1881. Sir William was repelled by his wife’s pregnancy, and the child, and saw no reason why they should not leave the baby in the care of others and continue their travels and social life. Robert became an accomplished artist and flying ace during World War I, dying in Italy in January, 1918 at the age of 36.
Sir William and Augusta travelled widely, spending winters in the warmer climes of Italy and Egypt. In 1883, in Egypt, they met Sir Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, an English diplomat, poet, Arabist, and political radical, a dashing figure who modeled himself after Lord Byron. The Gregorys became swept up in the movement for Egyptian nationalism. Augusta had a short affair with Blunt, and sent him sonnets she wrote about impossible love. He quickly moved on to his next conquest, but they remained friends and exchanged letters until his death. Through this affair with Blunt, Augusta discovered a cause – Egyptian nationalism – which sparked her personal literary ambition and political sensibilities. She learned that her letters to newspapers on the subject could be taken seriously and printed.
In Jungian terms, Augusta Gregory had a strong animus, or masculine side. She preferred the company of men. She disliked triviality, and considered most women preoccupied with trivial things. She wanted to be in the larger world of Ideas. Her early marriage to William Gregory allowed her to fill out her education, and she made the most of their travels to learn about art, diplomacy, and foreign affairs. She developed a desire to have some impact on public affairs, and later regretted not doing “some big thing” with William during their marriage. But when she took time to perform her public charity works, he reminded her often of her duties to him and family.
Augusta had a gift for cultivating friends, mostly men, and faithfully maintained correspondence with them throughout her life. In addition to Blunt, she kept up an active correspondence with Yeats, Synge, John Quinn, Shaw, and O’Casey. Charles Stewart Parnell (1831-1891) was an Anglo-Irish landlord who turned on his social class to champion the rights of the tenants. He was so effective and popular, he was termed the “uncrowned king of Ireland.” His Land League encouraged the Land Acts that allowed Irish tenants to slowly buy out the landlord class. The death of Parnell in 1891 opened up space for the Irish Literary Renaissance. Culture and cultural nationalism seemed more amenable than politics. An ancient heroic past rooted in Ireland’s rediscovered mythology gripped the collective imagination.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) would take the center of the stage vacated by the death of Parnell. Sir William Gregory died in 1892. In 1894, Augusta first met the younger poet Yeats. They began a mutually supportive creative friendship. But Yeats, a shy dreamer and student of Balzac, was determined to be a literary Napoleon, a man of destiny. In 1897, Yeats spent the first of twenty successive summers at Coole Park. He and Augusta spent long days writing and reading their work to each other. The two of them, and Edward Martyn, began planning the Irish Literary Theatre.
The next year, Augusta began to learn Gaelic, and wrote her first unproduced play. She collected and interpreted Irish folk tales and popular versions of Irish mythology, which Yeats used for his poetry. Like Edith Somerville, her contemporary, another Anglo-Irish writer of comedies about the indigenous Irish, she realized that taking notes when speaking to the natives was offensive, so she trained her memory to hear their folk tales and write them down afterwards. She worked with Yeats, George Moore, and Douglas Hyde on plays for the Irish Literary Theatre.
In 1901, she co-wrote with Yeats two new plays for the Theatre, Cathleen ni Houlihan, and The Pot of Broth. Both were popular. The Irish Literary Theatre evolved into the Abbey Theatre, which opened in 1904. Augusta was one of the founders of the Abbey, along with Yeats and John Millington Synge. She began to write plays for it, eventually creating 39 plays, apart from her collaborations with Yeats, and translations/adaptations. One of her plays, Spreading the News, was a hit, and along with the two earlier plays, became part of the Abbey repertory. She also managed the Theatre and found funding for it. It internationalized and elevated the status of Irish writing to such an extent that Teddy Roosevelt attended the first Abbey tour in Washington, D.C. in 1911.
Augusta wrote plays in every genre: comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, wonder and supernatural. She was also the consummate patron, not only finding funding but managing details, mediating disputes with the actors, and organizing tours. The Abbey Theatre would not have survived without her. At the Abbey in 1907, a courageous Lady Gregory stuck up for Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World against the narrow, prudish nationalists who rioted against it when it opened. Throughout all the controversies, Lady Gregory and Yeats elevated Art over Politics, carefully avoiding the accusation of writing propaganda for Irish nationalism and its simmering violence.
She continued to take on new challenges. In 1911, on her first U.S. trip with the Abbey actors, in Boston she befriended the art collector Isabella Gardner and, at the age of 59, tried public speaking for the first time. Realizing that she was good at it, she made a total of four visits to America on lecture tours in the next four years. During that first trip, she had a brief affair with the New York lawyer and wealthy bachelor John Quinn, who helped defend the Abbey actors when riots broke out at their U.S. performances. On her last trip, in 1915, she visited Minneapolis and spoke to the Woman’s Club.
George Bernard Shaw described her with admiration as the Irish Moliere. She is the most significant female playwright between the death of Synge in 1909 and the ascent of Sean O’Casey in the 1920’s with his Dublin trilogy. Lady Gregory’s home at Coole Park in Galway was the undisputed hub and seedbed of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Yeats drew sustenance, dreamed, discussed and wrote there, alongside Augusta. Dozens of authors and artists visited Coole Park, the most significant of which were A.E. (George) Russell, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, George Moore, and Sean O’Casey.
Living within the patriarchal mores of Victorian society, sometimes compared to Queen Victoria (a superficial resemblance only, with her facial profile and black widow’s weeds), she practiced self-censorship, not mentioning her affair with Blunt, or her co-authorship with Yeats of Cathleen ni Houlihan, although she wrote “all this mine alone” on the original manuscript. She over-prioritized Yeats, making him the central figure of the Renaissance, and downplaying herself.
As for her shadow side, she could be aloof and condescending to the Abbey Theatre actors; she disliked Margaret, her spoiled English daughter-in-law; she tangled with the Englishwoman Annie Horniman, another patron of Yeats and the Abbey; and she sometimes resorted to flattery and influence peddling to get her way. Starting her life in the persona of a genteel Ascendency woman of the gentry class, always deferential to men, she grew in confidence so that by 1909 she stood her ground and defied the Irish Viceroy to stage a censored play by her friend George Bernard Shaw.
Lady Gregory was a consummate diplomat and mediator, often subsuming her ego to the greater good of her family, Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Ireland and Home Rule, and at the end, relinquishing her beloved Coole Park. She was a doting mother and grandmother. She had a balanced view of her achievement. Near the end of her life, she wrote: “I know I have left a sheaf that contains its quota of golden grain; I have been but the reaper, the ripened ears came from the poor, the people; the sun that ripened the harvest comes from beyond the world, I can claim diligence, and love—for the work—for the people—for the Abbey—for Ireland—that ‘constraineth me’ to do such service as I may.”
Individuation was Jung’s idea that in later stages of life, humans can reach a state of self- actualization by reconciling their polarities, such as animus/anima, introvert/extrovert. Lady Augusta Gregory overcame her childhood struggle to define herself, and created a career of both artistic and historic significance. She was both idealistic and practical. She achieved Individuation.
This is the fourth in a series of co-authored articles on “Jung and the Irish Writer.” Earlier articles
looked at James Joyce, George ‘A.E.’ Russell, and Samuel Beckett. Please see the previous article:
Epiphany! Carl Jung and the Irish Writer: Samuel Beckett in Issue 24, Imbolc 2024.
References
Declan Kiberd: Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, Harvard University Press, 1995.
Judith Hill, Lady Gregory: An Irish Life, Sutton Publishing Limited, 2005 (hardback), The Collins
Press, 2011 (paperback)
An online museum exhibition on Lady Gregory – 2020 – the New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/all-this-mine-alone
The Real Lady Gregory: Ireland’s First Social Influencer – Two-hour RTE series starring MiriamMargoles – from 2023 (not available online) Related podcast: https://www.rte.ie/culture/2023/0227/1359189-listen-the-real-lady-gregory-irelands-first-social-influencer/
Queen of Coole – 22-minute YouTube video – documentary – 2022 – NUI Galway
