Biography: At the 2004 Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering (an annual sell-out event at Coole), Guy de Winton, the playwright's great grandson, now resident in Australia, read an account of her funeral in May 1932, writes Adrian Frazier
Just as WB Yeats had occupied the master bedroom and the head of the table at Coole, so he sat in the lead car in the funeral procession from Coole through Gort to the Protestant graveyard in Galway city. This left an irritable Margaret Gregory Gough (Lady Gregory's widowed daughter-in-law, legal owner of Coole, and from 1928 wife of Guy Gough) to follow in a second car with her daughters, Catherine and Anne, the source of this story.
Yeats instructed the chauffeur to proceed at a dirge-like pace so that the tenantry could pay their last respects to the beloved lady of the house. But the roadside was empty down the long avenue of the demesne. Nor did crowds wait, hats off, alongside the road towards Gort. It turned out everyone was in Ennis, at the funeral of a local builder. Steaming with impatience, Margaret gave orders to her driver. Amid a shower of gravel Yeats's lead car was overtaken, and the convoy sped towards Galway.
This anecdote does not appear in Judith Hill's Lady Gregory: An Irish Life, yet it underpins the tale she has to tell. Daughter of a cold proselytiser and a hard-drinking father who saw a benefit in the Famine (cleared the estate of those unable to pay rent), Augusta Persse at 25 made a successful leap into another world when 60-year-old Sir William Gregory proposed in 1880. In the decade of the Land Wars, he took her to Paris, Florence, Egypt, and India. Based in London, they rarely spent time at Coole, where Sir William was less popular than he presumed. As an MP, in 1847 Gregory had attached to the Famine Poor Law bill a clause forbidding any tenant with more than ¼ acre from obtaining relief, so basically it became a law against relief for the poor, the starving poor. After Sir William's death in 1892 Augusta made Coole her own. She invented around it a Camelot-like Tennysonian idyll of duty, nobility, and glory, and represented herself as its custodian till the heir, young Robert, came of age.
In 1897, however, long before Robert came of age, Lady Gregory, then 45, brought the handsome and penniless young poet WB Yeats into this idea of Coole. She wore widow's weeds, but Lady Gregory was not sexless. Two ladies' men made passes at her, and she warmly responded each time. In 1882, two years after her marriage, she had leapt dangerously into an affair with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. And when she was 60, after nights in his New York apartment, she would tumble head-over-heels in love with John Quinn. But Yeats, obsessed with Maud Gonne, and not a man to make passes even at her, did not see the sexual side of Lady Gregory, either in 1897 or thereafter.
She gave him dinners, folklore collected in the Gort workhouse, guarantors against losses for his plays, £20-notes behind the clock in his London flat, dialogue for Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), room and board all summer long year in and year out. The manoeuvre, as Judith Hill says, was "a stroke of genius". "Augusta had done what no one else in their circle had had the courage or inclination to do. She had successfully offered herself to another - her work, her money, her influence, her intellectual and material support . . . It was from her position at Yeats's right hand that Augusta would make her own individual contribution."
That contribution was not small. She not only made Coole into something close to the Kiltartan Camelot she imagined, she responded creatively to drastic historical change in a long row of books. Her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, even if bowdlerized and folk-ed up, remains the most readable and vivid prose version of the stories of the Red Branch. Her managerial work for the Abbey Theatre was steady and courageous, and what Yeats did, one doubts he could have done without her. It was Lady Gregory who wrote the plays that actors liked to act and people liked to see, and even if their time is past, no theatre lives upon timeless masterpieces. Hill makes a claim that the folklife of Ireland, now largely gone with the snows of yesteryear, may be recovered in those plays, but she does not illustrate that claim. My belief is that Lady Gregory comes through best in her letters; there is a saltiness, humour, and aggressive management of others in them that is magnificently formidable. I wish more of the letters had been quoted in this narrative, which, while well-proportioned and full of good sense, often depends upon what scholars have quoted in other books.
The pity of this great figure is that when Robert (by then a prep school imperialist) came back to Coole with his wife, and later with his son, he found a very large cuckoo in the nest. Robert dropped hints, like bring your own wine next time, and later, bring your own crystal decanter for it too, which Yeats chose to overlook. Robert's death during the Great War came about the same time as Yeats's marriage, and left poor Lady Gregory, maker and defender of a benignant Ascendancy tradition, facing a future without posterity.
Adrian Frazier is director of MA programmes in writing and drama & theatre Studies at NUI Galway. He is currently writing Hollywood Irish, a book about Abbey actors who migrated to Hollywood in the 1930s
Lady Gregory: An Irish Life By Judith Hill Sutton Publishing, 420pp. £20