The voluminous journals of the playwright, folklorist and patron of the arts, Lady Augusta Gregory, contain a wealth of detail on her relationship with the poet, WB Yeats. Their deep friendship was intriguing and sometimes tense. Yeats sent her a telegram to tell her of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to him in 1923 and she recorded: “I am proud and glad of this triumph for I believed in him always . . . in these 26 years our friendship has never been broken.”
It remained that way until her death in 1932. She provided an anchor for Yeats and for him, that was priceless. Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster notes that when Gregory was seriously ill in 1909, a fretting Yeats wrote: “Friendship is all the house I have.” Gregory’s companionship and her house in Coole Park were both sanctuary and stimulus for him.
For all that, he could be a right brat. When he was preparing his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm this month a century ago, he sent Gregory a draft which included the contention that the prize should have been shared with Synge and Gregory, “an old woman sinking into the infirmities of age”. Her response in her journal was spiky: “Not even fighting them.” She told him to amend the draft because his words could “be considered to mean that I had gone silly”. He duly made an amendment, but only slightly; the final version described her as “a living woman sinking into the infirmity of age”. As Colm Tóibín wrote in his book Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, “There was always that mixture in their relationship of complete empathy and bouts of tactlessness on his side, and a mixture of possessiveness and a willingness to stand up to him on her side.”
At times, Yeats was dismissive of Gregory’s artistic merit, writing in his own memoir that “she has never been part of the artist’s world, she has belonged to a political world, or one that is merely social”. That was both mean-spirited and untrue. The Abbey Theatre staged 19 original plays and seven translations by Gregory between 1904 and 1912, and she expended much energy on collecting and preserving Irish folklore and on running and keeping the Abbey that she co-founded open.
The popularity of her comedies stoked Yeats’s snobbery. But Gregory knew her own worth and was not slow to embrace it. She made a point in December 1923 of recording the contents of an article by Irish nationalist politician and stalwart of the Irish community in Britain, TP O’Connor, who had written: “It is impossible to mention Mr Yeats without adding something of what he and Ireland owe to the unselfish, devoted and unconquerable woman who has helped him and Ireland towards the great literary renaissance of modern days.”
It is true that Gregory was deeply engaged with the politics of her time, though she was decidedly old-fashioned when it came to women and public life. She wrote in her journal in September 1919 that she had a rule of “never talking of politics with a woman”, and referred disparagingly to Constance Markievicz as “a rather jealous meddler in the Abbey”.
But she did talk politics with men, especially with Yeats, and did profoundly political things during her career. Many of her journal entries for December 1923 refer to the plight of anti-Treaty IRA prisoners who had come off a mass hunger strike the previous month. Her republicanism has been assessed as mild; she was not considered a “diehard”, but she was much less well disposed towards the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the new Free State government than Yeats. She described an encounter with a local priest just before Christmas 1923: “I told Fr O’Kelly one should not be more angry with government or republicans than with different sections of one’s own mind, tilting to good or bad on one or the other side.”
She deftly managed to keep a foot in both camps, which also ensured that her house, unlike some others belonging to her class, was left unscathed during the War of Independence and Civil War. The house was ultimately sold to the Irish forestry commission of the Free State and after her death, sold on to a local builder who demolished it.
In 2020, Druid Theatre’s Garry Hynes directed a number of Gregory’s plays, partly to rectify a neglect: “She’s in the vault of history, she’s known by name but not performed very often,” Hynes observed. Next year, the Abbey Theatre’s Gregory Project, marking 120 years of the National Theatre of Ireland, will include a body of new and established plays, all of them by women: Hilary Fannin, Elizabeth Kuti, Barbara Bergin, Mary Manning, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Marina Carr. Together, they will deservedly lift Gregory further out of the vault and Yeats’s shadow.