Complex character with more than one string to her bow
The fact that this response was transfigured years later by WB Yeats in Beautiful Lofty Things is another indicator, this time of the complex relationship between this west of Ireland landowner and the sophisticated man of literary fame.
However, anyone expecting Judith Hill’s biography of Lady Gregory to concentrate on a relationship supposed to define the importance of the doyenne of Coole Park and the Abbey Theatre is in for a surprise. This is a biography of exhaustive, but not exhausting, detail. There were many Augusta Gregorys, and only one or two Yeats.
Isabella Augusta Persse was born one of 13 children of Galway landlord Dudley Persse and his wife Frances; there were three more children from Dudley’s first marriage. A self-indulgent authoritarian who by Augusta’s teenage years was unable to walk, his character wasdescribed by Augusta as one which never allowed his paralysis interfere with his pleasures.
Although a quiet book-loving child, this daughter must have become adept early at negotiating not only with truculent older men but also with the complaints of neighbouring farmers and tenants. From her mother’s conventional religious devotion she developed a life-long faith, enhanced by the language of her own bible reading and tempered by experience, but from that huge family background she kept few companions who might be called close.
“Augusta’s autobiography is a highly unsatisfactory account of her life”, writes Judith Hill. With entries without references and a considerable amount of self-censorship the researcher is admitted “into a bewildering, multifaceted world, by turns diverted and bored.”
Yeats’s memoirs, on the other hand, had a narrative shape and purpose. As Lady Gregory herself wrote (they were reading their manuscripts to one another) ‘he is making a wonderful piece of tapestry, of homogeneous work, that will stand with his other work. Mine is in lumps, in patches. It can’t be helped’. It was, Hill remarks, ‘the rich encyclopaedic quality of her life and its moments of historical importance that interested Yeats — and, it might be said, everyone else as well. And it is from those lumps and patches, with scrupulous examination and a generosity of vision that Judith Hill has built a fluid and engrossing account of a life which can only be described as extraordinary in its influence and its contradictions.
Coole Park was only eight miles or so from Augusta’s home at Roxborough, where in 1877 the 60-year-old widower Sir William Gregory came courting. Twenty-five years older than his new bride William was an affectionate and erudite husband although his Irish reputation was darkened first by his youthful squandering of family fortune and then by the Gregory Clause, introduced in his parliamentary term as a means of restricting famine workhouse shelter to tenants with less than a quarter acre of land.
As Lady Gregory, Augusta saw at Coole how land and tenants could or should be managed, and she also conceived the life-long conviction that the house and estate should be protected as the inheritance of her son Robert and his heirs.
Marriage involved travels abroad which opened up a cultural world which made foreign destinations and experiences available along with a residence in London, a firm domestic role in Ireland, and a beloved son left frequently at home. Thus Augusta began to make her way in international society, in artistic circles, and in “passionate attachments to men or vision or genius” which led to full-scale but discreet adultery with at least two of them.
It was with her affair Wilfred Scawen Blunt that she began her life as a writer, first with a kind of dilettante journalism which was to strengthen much later in her articles for The Nation. She might also be said to have begun her life of deception.
It was always difficult to know all of her, especially when, as a widow, she diversified from country house hostess to literary amanuensis to folklorist to reporter and even, although as something of an afterthought, to mother.
The incidents of her family life, most tragically in the death of her son in WWI, are well recounted here, along with the political and social entanglements of Ireland in the early 20th century when Coole Park was enmeshed not only in the War of Independence and the Civil War but in decades of land agitation. This last resulted in the ever-increasing reduction of the property which Augusta had so strenuously defended, even against her own daughter-in-law, Margaret.
Given that Yeats was inclined to think that he could make better use than Augusta of the material she amassed and published on west of Ireland legends and folktales, it is no great surprise that there remains some dispute about the authorship of her most famous production, Cathleen ní Houlihan, first published by Yeats in another example of the little deceits which she found occasionally necessary and Yeats found sometimes useful.
The fortitude with which Lady Gregory worked as patron to Yeats, Synge, the Fay brothers in their inspired efforts to develop the Abbey Theatre and eventually to Seán O’Casey were also brought to the battle to reclaim the pictures intended for the new municipal art gallery in Dublin but left, by his death in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, with the National Gallery in London.
This bitter dispute joins the list of distressing or shameful private quarrels and public rows with which she will be forever associated but which she always survived.
Landlord, nationalist, entrepreneur, stage manager, playwright, poet and patron, stoical in enduring operations for breast cancer under local anaesthetic, a woman whose life, as she said, was “a series of enthusiasms”, she died after walking for the last time through the rooms of the house she loved so much in May, 1932.
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