After the death of her husband, Lady Gregory became fascinated with the poet William Butler Yeats. 13 years older and of a higher social class, always called him “Willie” while he never addressed her as anything other than “Lady Gregory.” [1]
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager who played a significant role in the Irish literary revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was born on 15 March 1852 in County Galway, Ireland.
Augusta, as she was known, was the twelfth child of an Anglo-Irish family who had lived in the area since the 17th century. Her father, Dudley Persse, was a landowner and magistrate, who had three children during his first marriage and thirteen with his second wife, Frances, Augusta’s mother. Augusta grew up in a comfortable home but had a distant relationship with her mother who preferred her sons to her daughters, and had little in common with her quiet, studious daughter. One of the formative influences of her early life was her nurse Mary Sheridan who worked for the family for over 40 years.
On 4 March 1880 when she was 28 years old Augusta married Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower 35 years her senior. He was a well-educated man with many literary and artistic interests, and his estate housed a large library and extensive art collection, both of which Lady Gregory was very eager to explore.
The couple spent a considerable amount of time in London, 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‘ poems An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, In Memory of Major Robert Gregory and Shepherd and Goatherd.
Lady Gregory worked extremely closely with renowned W.B. Yeats and others to found an Irish Theatre company, and she was critical in getting the financial backing to set up the Abbey Theatre which opened in 1904 and in which she would be involved for most of the rest of her life, writing 19 plays to be performed there, in addition to her role as a director. The Abbey thrives to this day as the National Theatre of Ireland.
Lady Gregory died on 23 May 1932.
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