Lady Gregory An Irish Life by Judith Hill

Lady Gregory An Irish Life by Judith Hill  (2011, 616 pages)

"Mancin's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
'Greatest since Rembrandt:, according to John Synge:
A great ebullient portrait certainly,
But where is the brush that could show anything
Of all that pride and that humility".

Lovers of one the finest poets ever to live, William Butler Yeats owe a great debt to Lady Augusta Gregory for her patronage of his work.   She took a great deal of stress of day to day life from Yeats and allowed him to focus on his writings.  If this was all Lady Gregory did the literary world and Ireland would owe her a great debt to her.    It is not easy to see at first the great importance and the amazing accomplishments of Lady Gregory.   She lived intentionally in the shadow of men, she never really quite rose above her patrician Anglo Irish roots but she brought about the rebirth of the Irish theater, was an avid student and preserver of West Irish folk ways, an excellent writer and in addition to being the patron of Yeats she helped John Synge struggle with his personal issues and the public reception to his plays.   I am convinced now Synge is clearly the third most important modern Irish writer behind Joyce and Yeats.    Based on Hill's superb biography I do not think Synge would have had the strength, based on his health and personal issues to go on writing if it were not for Gregory who was a kind of buffer between he and Yeats.   If Yeats and Synge helped create modern Irish identity and built the pride of the nation, Lady Gregory was there making sure it happened.

Augusta Gregory (1852 to 1932-County Galway, Ireland) was born into affluent Anglo-Irish family, with six thousand acres.   Their ancestral home was burned down during the Irish Civil War.   At age 25, she married Sir William Gregory, thirty five years her senior and a former governor of Ceylon.   He was a fairly recent widower and he wanted a "serviceable and appropriate wife" and Augusta and her family were not displeased by a match with a very wealthy  older man.   Through the marriage she became Lady Gregory and from Hill's book I cannot imagine every calling her anything other than "Lady Gregory".

Hill's biography is perfect.   She greatly respects her subject, as she should, but she is not blind to her imperfections.   Lady Gregory was more than a bit elitist, she liked to be the lady of the manor dispensing charity to her tenants, she enjoyed the company of the brilliant men like Yeats and Synge and a cynic could say she bought their  company and forced them to pay attention to her for access to her money.   Hill is forthcoming about the two extra-marital romances in Lady Gregory's Life.   I was fascinated by Hill's description of the time her and her husband spent in Egypt.      Cairo was the exotic east in the late 1800s and it opened visitors to forbidden at home pleasures.

Hill also tells us a lot about the management of the Abbey Theater.   I was fascinated to learn about her thoughts on Maud Goone (she did not like her for Yeats at all) and I was happy to see her acceptance of Yeat's wife, George.   It appears Lady Gregory did not have much of an interest in the occult but she did not criticize those in her circle with strong preoccupations in this area, including Yeats.

W. B. Yeats wrote a very famous and beautiful poem about the death of Lady Gregory's son Robert in World War I. "An Irish Airman Foresees Hus Death" and Hill helped me to understand the background behind this masterwork.

Lady Gregory An Irish Life is a great biography and a work of serious art.   Those interested in Yeats and Synge for sure will love and profit from this book.   It will also be fascinating for those interested in the social history of Ireland, the Irish theater, and the relationship of the sexes in the period.    We also learn a good bit about the troubled lives of her brothers, the lives of her children, grandchildren and daughter-in-laws.

Hill has written a long enough book to tell us a lot about Lady Gregory's life and times.  I started this book with a preconceived notion that Lady Gregory was just a wealthy woman buying some literary attention and Hill accepts the negative aspects of her behaviour and character.   I closed the book with sense of gratitude to Gregory for what she did for Yeats and Synge and to Hill for allowing me to see beyond my preconceptions.

Lady Gregory An Irish Life by Judith Hill is biography at the highest level of art and perspicuity.     It is very well documented and there is an excellent bibliography.   This is a very interesting look at the life of a fascinating woman.   Some may scorn her for her deference to men but she was a product of her time and upbringing and you will close this book with a great deal of respect for a brilliant, very creative and amazingly strong woman.   She was also deeply cultured and I enjoyed learning about her reading life.   Hill tells us enough about the politics of the period to help us under the social background of the events she depicts.

This book is must reading for those interested in the history of Irish Literature.

Hill is a well known historian of Georgian era architecture.


Mel u
The Reading Life

"Silence" and "Synge and his Family" by Colm Toibin

"Synge and his Family"  (2012, Chapter Four of New Ways to Kill Your Mother)
"Silence"     (2011)

The Irish Quarter

I am now firmly convinced that John M. Synge (1871 to 1909-most famously author of The Playboy of the Western World) is the third most important figure in modern Irish literary history.   I am still pondering how Lady Augusta Gregory, co-founder and patron of the Abby Theater, should be viewed.   Much of my current understanding of her was shaped by my reading of Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin.  Clearly she was of at least two minds.   On the one hand she was deeply into Irish culture and on the other she as deeply aristocratic, she was very hard on her tenant farmers and basically romanticized the ordinary people of Ireland while looking down on them as individuals.   

"Silence" is  the lead story in Colm Toibin's most recent collection of short stories, The Empty Family.   In this story, which does not let us know who it was about until a few pages have gone by probably so we will not prejudge Gregory, we see how Gregory viewed herself.   We learn of her long term adultery, we learn a good bit about her marriage, and we see how society viewed her.   "Silence" is a very good story.   I think it helps if you know something about why Gregory matters and once you do maybe you will be able to understand her motivations a bit better.   If you want to read this story, you can download the sample eBook from Amazon. 

"Synge and His Family" is a biographical and literary essay from Toibin collection Nine Ways to Kill Your Mother.  ( I think in  Synge one should first read The Playboy of the Western World and then The Aran Islands, followed by the rest of his plays, there are only six and one is incomplete.)  Toibin's essay  is very interesting and I think anyone into Irish literature would profit from reading it.   He tries to "debunk" the notion that W. B. Yeats pushed Synge into going to the Aran Islands, explains his role as the "black sheep" of the family and his long term dependency on his mother.  HE also helps one to understand why his famous play was so controvesial when it was first produced.  




Please share your experience with John Synge or Augusta Gregory with us.

"Sounds ever so dull to me"
Carmilla

Mel U

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin  (2002, 82 pages-Biography)

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin centers on the life of Augusta Gregory (1852 to 1932, Galway, Ireland).   Lady Gregory, she got her title when she married Sir William Gregory, thirty five years her senior,one time governor of Ceylon and considered to have been instrumental in passing laws while a member of parliament that made the fates of the Irish peasants much worse during the famine years.   Gregory, partially thorough and maybe largely through her contact with William Butler Yeats and John M. Synge, came to idolize and romanticize those same peasants while never abandoning the sense of entitlement her marriage gave her.   She is sometimes seen as a hypocritcal figure who spoke of her love for freedom and her wish for a better life for the peasants of Ireland while clinging to her  big house, her Anglo-Irish money and her view of real life ordinary Irish people outside of her small circle as unwashed people who mostly did not own toothbrushes.

Lady Gregory helped found and directed the famous Abby Theater in London.   Toibin does a great job of explaining why this theater was very important in the creation of a sense of Irish identity through plays like The Playboy of the Western World by John Synge.  When the play was first preformed there were riots at the Abby Theater, partially caused by references to Irish women in "shifts" and by its seeming portrayal of the Irish as loving violence country buffoons .   Lady Gregory, as Toibin explains it, referred to the conflict over this play as the battle between those who use a toothbrush, the play's supporters, and those who do not.  Like many an aristocrat who cry out their love for the common man, she liked them best in plays and stories.

Toibin help me greatly to understand the importance of Lady Gregory to Irish Theater.  Even though it can be argued that she was simply a rich woman buying attention from literary greats with money she inherited from a man who exploited horribly the Irish peasants, there import in the great plays of Synge and O'Casey can be directly traced to her.   She did not just give money, she worked very hard to promote the theater and was a still respected student of Irish folklore.   It is hard to really determine Yeats true feeling for her, he needed her money so everything has to a bit ambiguous.  Toibin handles this brilliantly without forcing an opinion on us.

Toibin's prose is as one would expect wonderful.   Lady Gregory's Toothbrush for sure increased my understanding of the Irish culture.   I am starting to understand more and more the central import of the plays of John Synge and Toibin was very illuminating in his remarks on Synge.   I also learned a good bit more about the background of William Butler Yeat's great poems concerning the death of Lady Gregory's son, the most famous of which is "An Irish Airmen Foresees His Death".

This book was a great pleasure to read.  Toibin also lets us see that Lady Gregory, with deep Anglo-Irish aristocratic roots, her money came directly from Irish peasants working in near slave conditions for her husband and his ancestry, was trying desperately to produce an Irish identity for herself while keeping her deeply entrenched belief that she, along with her primary mentor and patronage recipient, were of an old the natural heirs of an Irish aristocracy going back to the Celts and beyond.  In Lady Gregory's jest about a toothbrush, one seems beneath layers of pretense.

I very much enjoyed this book, learned a lot from it, and I endorse it to anyone interested in Irish literature or history.

It is available from Lilliput Press, Ireland's leading independent publishing house.  A perusal of their catalog is itself a great learning experience.

Mel u

The Rising of the Moon by Lady Augusta Gergory

The Rise of the Moon by Lady Augusta Gregory (1907, a play in one act)

What school in the Philippines is teaching this story?  Please leave a comment.  I live in The Capital Region

I think most people's image of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852 to 1932-County Galway, Ireland) is that of a very rich lady who used her money to buy her way into the inner circles of the Irish Theater and of William Butler Yeats.   This is not entirely fair but it is not real far from the mark.

I have for sometime wanted to read one of her plays and I was very glad to find a rather short one (under twenty pages) in For the Love of Ireland:  A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers by Susan Cahill.  Gregory wrote a lot of plays, all of which were preformed at the Abbey Theater in Dublin (which was largely run on donations from Gregory).    I am glad I read this play and would like to read some of her short stories based on her research into Irish folktales.

"The Rising of the Moon", first preformed in 1907 at the Abbey Theater, is a very simple work with only two real important characters.  One is a police sergeant, with some of his men, who are on the look out for a leading member of an organization seeking Ireland's freedom from English rule.  The other is the man they are seeking.   As the play opens the sergeant and his men are looking for good places to put up wanted posters.  There is a hundred pound reward for the capture of the man, a lot of money to most people then.   One of the policemen says that anybody on the force who captures him is sure to get promoted.   The sergeant explains to his men that they are doing very important work in keeping the public order.

The sergeant sends his men on their way to put up wanted posters all over town.  A man dressed in old clothes comes along and the sergeant demands to know who he is and what he is doing walking about.  The man explains that he is Jimmy Walsh, a ballad singer.  It is interesting that the sergeant speaks the king's English but the ballad singer speaks in  Irish dialogue, or at least Irish dialect as Lady Gregory from a very Anglo/Irish patrician background, saw it.   It comes across now as a little patronizing.  The man begins to sing a ballad and the sergeant says "stop that noise".   As I know not to many people are ever going to read this play (and even less this post!) I will tell the ending.  The sergeant figures out that the man is the wanted  person and he lets him go.

I am glad I read this play and will in time read more of her work and perhaps I will read Colm Toibin's book on her.  I have read his short story based on her, "Silence" and will post on it soon.

You can download a lot of her work, including her dramas, from Manybooks.

Mel u