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Lady Augusta
Gregory ~
Gort |
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Isabelle Augusta Gregory is easily the best known
literary figure to have been born and raised in Galway. After the death of her
elderly husband, Sir William, in 1891, Lady Gregory began her transformation
into one of the nation's cultural champions. In her lifetime she wrote over 40
plays in addition to a great number of poems and essays. Her greatest
accomplishment was the founding of what became the Abbey Theatre with William
Butler Yeats in 1904.
The establishment of the theatre marks the official
beginning of the Irish Literary Revival, and plays from Yeats, J.M. Synge, Sean
O'Casey and herself were produced in the years to follow. |
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A few of Lady
Gregory's most famous plays included Spreading the News (1904), The Gaol Gate
(1906), and The Rising of the Moon (1907).
Lady Gregory possessed a most remarkable mind. It was at the young age of 50
that she first mastered the Irish language, a development that would be critical
for her many prodigious contributions to the Gaelic League and other efforts to
strengthen nationalism through the public appreciation of Irish literature and
speech. Some of her greatest work comes from the long days she spent collecting
Irish folktales and stories in the countryside: Cuchulain of Muirthemne was a
work that Yeats called, "The best book that has ever come out of Ireland." Her
study of the Irish language also led her to develop the first Anglo-Irish
dialect to be adopted by the poets and playwrights of the land. The dialect was
called Kiltartan, after the region from which it sprung.
Because of Lady Gregory's prominent position in the revival, her home at
Coole
Park became a second home for the writers of this Irish Renaissance. Yeats spent many summers there, and the famous 'autograph tree' on the estate
still bears the signatures of the frequent visitors J.M Synge, W.B Yeats, Jack
Yeats, George Russell (AE), Douglas Hyde, Sean O’Casey and George Bernard Shaw,
to name a few.
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