Augusta, Lady Gregory

Augusta, Lady Gregory (born March 15, 1852, Roxborough, County Galway, Ireland—died May 22, 1932, Coole) was an Irish writer and playwright who, by her translations of Irish legends, her peasant comedies and fantasies based on folklore, and her work for the Abbey Theatre, played a considerable part in the late 19th-century Irish literary renascence.

In 1880 she married Sir William Henry Gregory, a neighbouring landowner who had previously served as a member of Parliament and as governor of Ceylon (Sri Lanka); her literary career did not begin until after his death (1892). In 1896 she met William Butler Yeats and became his lifelong friend and patron. She took part in the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre (1899) and became a director (1904) of the Abbey Theatre, which owed much of its success to her skill at smoothing the disputes among its highly individualistic Irish nationalist founders. As a playwright, she wrote pleasant comedies based on Irish folkways and picturesque peasant speech, offsetting the more tragic tones of the dramas of Yeats and J.M. Synge.

Lady Gregory wrote or translated nearly 40 plays. Seven Short Plays (1909), her first dramatic works, are among her best, vivid in dialogue and characterization. The longer comedies, The Image and Damer’s Gold, were published in 1910 and 1913 and her strange realistic fantasies, The Golden Apple and The Dragon, in 1916 and 1920. She also arranged and made continuous narratives out of the various versions of Irish sagas, translating them into an Anglo-Irish peasant dialect that she labeled “Kiltartan.” These were published as Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904).

Colin Smythe edited Seventy Years, Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory (1975), which consists basically of excerpts of diaries and letters with comment.