Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (; 15 March 1852 – 22 May 1932) was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.
Lady Gregory is mainly remembered for her work behind the Irish Literary Revival. Her home at Coole Park in County Galway served as an important meeting place for leading Revival figures, and her early work as a member of the board of the Abbey was at least as important as her creative writings for that theatre's development. Lady Gregory's motto was taken from Aristotle: "To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people."
Biography
Early life and marriage
Gregory was born at Roxborough, County Galway, the youngest daughter of the Anglo-Irish gentry family Persse. Her mother, Frances Barry, was related to Viscount Guillamore, and her family home, Roxborough, was a 6,000-acre (24 km2) estate located between Gort and Loughrea, the main house of which was later burnt down during the Irish Civil War. She was educated at home, and her future career was strongly influenced by the family nurse (i.e. nanny), Mary Sheridan, a Catholic and a native Irish speaker, who introduced the young Augusta to the history and legends of the local area.
She married Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower with an estate at Coole Park, near Gort, on 4 March 1880 in St. Matthais' Church, Dublin. Sir William, who was 36 years her elder, had just retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), having previously served several terms as Member of Parliament for County Galway. He was a well-educated man with many literary and artistic interests, and the house at Coole Park housed a large library and extensive art collection, both of which Lady Gregory was eager to explore. He also had a house in London, where the couple spent a considerable amount of time, holding weekly salons frequented by many leading literary and artistic figures of the day, including Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, John Everett Millais and Henry James. Their only child, Robert Gregory, was born in 1881. He was killed during the First World War while serving as a pilot, an event which inspired W. B. Yeats's poems "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" and "Shepherd and Goatherd".
Early writings
The Gregorys travelled in Ceylon, India, Spain, Italy and Egypt. While in Egypt Lady Gregory met, and in 1882 and 1883 had an affair with, the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, during which she wrote a series of love poems, A Woman's Sonnets.
Her earliest work to appear under her own name was Arabi and His Household (1882), a pamphlet—originally a letter to The Times—in support of Ahmed Orabi Pasha, leader of what has come to be known as the Urabi Revolt, an 1879 Egyptian nationalist revolt against the oppressive regime of the Khedive and the European domination of Egypt. She later said of this booklet, "whatever political indignation or energy was born with me may have run its course in that Egyptian year and worn itself out". Despite this, in 1893 she published A Phantom's Pilgrimage, or Home Ruin, an anti-Nationalist pamphlet against William Ewart Gladstone's proposed second Home Rule Act. The unsigned pamphlet features Egyptian gods sitting in judgment upon Gladstone, and his phantom being shown the results of high taxes and English government. As James Pethica writes, "With its uncompromising portrayal of a country sliding into anarchy and ruin, the anonymous pamphlet drew appreciative comment from those of Gregory's London friends who knew it to be her work. 'It has been a success,' she noted in her diary[.]"