{"id":387,"date":"2020-08-25T11:22:45","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T15:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wanderofwanders.com\/?p=387"},"modified":"2025-08-25T18:50:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T22:50:20","slug":"an-irish-woman-of-substance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wanderofwanders.com\/index.php\/2020\/08\/25\/an-irish-woman-of-substance\/","title":{"rendered":"An Irish woman of substance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Lady Augusta Gregory<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Hi, readers. I have settled\nin a bit here in Corofin, and while life is never boring it has taken on a\ntinge of predictability. So I have decided to turn my attention in upcoming\nblogs less to memoir and more to some of the fascinating tidbits I\u2019ve learned\nfrom my, admittedly, limited travel in Ireland. The journalist and student in\nme never tires of undertaking research, digging deeper, to gain a richer\nunderstanding of the places where I\u2019ve visited. And I\u2019d like to share some of these\nthoughts with you, in hopes that if you do come, or come back, to Ireland you\nmay wish to visit these places yourself. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chances are quite good that you\nknow the names of literary luminaries George Bernard Show and William Butler\nYeats, perhaps are familiar with some of their writings. If, like me, you by\nchance took a course in Irish playwrights in college, John Millington Synge and\nSean O\u2019Casey may also be familiar names. Irishmen all, they rose to prominence\nin the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century at a time known\nas the Irish Literary Revival, or Irish Renaissance. As I understand it, the\nliterary revival was precipitated on the notion that it was time to reclaim\nIreland\u2019s rich language, culture and heritage, to elevate the lives of rank and\nfile Irish people and revisit the lore and tales of the ancients. Many such\ntales came out of the oral tradition but some had been put to paper by early\nChristian (300-600 CE) monks who wrote not only treatises from their own\nreligious tradition but also about those practices and stories of pre-Christian,\npagan Ireland which then abounded. The Revival occurred at a time of great\nliterary flowering and at a time when the drumbeat for Irish independence was growing\nto a mighty din. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chances may not be as good,\nhowever, that you know the name of someone who was very much a central player\nin this revival — a pioneering folklorist who undertook to translate some of\nthe oldest extant written stories and scoured the countryside to gather oral\ntales, a playwright, a novelist and short story writer, an essayist, the founder\nand business manager of a successful Dublin theater and a homeowner who\nprovided literary refuge to all the men named above and more. Let me introduce\nyou, albeit imperfectly, to Lady Augusta Gregory. For much of her life she resided\nat Coole Park, an estate in Gort, County Galway, no more than 25 minutes from\nCorofin; and although I had heard of her, I had no idea the depth and breadth\nof her legacy until after I\u2019d visited there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gregory was born Isabella Augusta Persse\nin 1852, one of 13 children of a wealthy landholder who owned a 6,000-acre\nestate in County Galway. At the age of 28, surely an \u201cold maid\u201d by the\nstandards of the time, she married a wealthy landholder who lived close by.\nWidower William Gregory was 35 years her senior, and it is his family who owned\nCoole Park. Let me digress here for a moment for those perhaps unfamiliar with\nthe Anglo-Irish gentry of Ireland. There have been books, reams of material, written\nabout this, and I am really a newcomer so apologies in advance for my imperfect\ndistillation. It appears that as a result of the policies that began around the\ntime of Henry VIII, when he divested all the monasteries of holdings, took hold\nunder Oliver Cromwell, and was further honed following the Great Hunger (An\nGorta Mor) when so many died or left Ireland, large swaths of Irish land fell\ninto the ownership of a landed gentry class, nearly all of English descent. Some\nwere absentee landlords while many like the Persses and the Gregorys, lived on\ntheir land. The locals worked for the gentry, and I think it fair to say that\nthe twain rarely met. It was this world in which Gregory grew up and married. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was not until after her husband\ndied in 1892, when she was 40, that Gregory came into her own. She began\nwriting \u2013 a memoir, essays, short stories, poems, most under a pseudonym or\nanonymously (!). Both she and WB Yeats write about the time that they met in\n1897, and it is certainly true that she came out of her anonymous past to be a\nfull-fledged published writer under her own name as a result of their lifelong\nfriendship. Coole Park soon became what George Bernard Shaw called the\n\u201cworkshop of Ireland\u201d because she invited the budding talents of the day to stay\nof a summer. It sounds as if it became kind of literary refuge where the\nluminaries (mostly men) not only wrote in peace but would then come together in\nthe evening to discuss their work and the topics of the day. She and Yeats\nwould go on to found the Abbey Theater in Dublin, where the plays of Shaw,\nSynge, O\u2019Casey and others were performed, taking on the role of business\nmanager, fundraiser and talent scout. She ended up writing more than 19 plays\nherself, many produced at the Abbey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this is amazing enough, and\nall I rather knew in a \u201cJeopardy\u201d question kind of way, but I was most taken\nwith the part of her life I had not known \u2013 her legacy as a pioneering\nfolklorist. It seems that Gregory not only overcame the anonymity of her gender\nto become a known force in the Irish Renaissance, but just as importantly she\novercame the strictures of her class as she sought to give dignity and credence\nto native Irish men and women and their ancestral past. She writes: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was becoming conscious of a world close to me that I had been ignorant of.  It was not now in the corners of newspapers I looked for poetic emotion, nor even to the singers in the streets.  It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had known the local people all her life, but now purposefully sought to visit them in their homes, listen to their stories and write them down in her many \u201ccopy books.\u201d The result is \u201cVisions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland,\u201d a collection of tales taken verbatim from her neighbors and transcribed. She divided these into categories \u2013 sea stories, seers and healers, the evil eye, witches and wizards \u2013 and presented them to an Irish world that, thanks in no small part to the Irish Renaissance, was hungry for the lore. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An\nexample is Biddy Early, \u201cthe magic lady of Clare,\u201d who lived in these parts in\nthe early years of the 19th<\/sup> century. As Gregory began collecting the\nstories, she heard many about Biddy, an herbalist and healer with more than a hint\nof the otherworldly. Said one person: \u201cThere used surely to be enchanters in\nthe old time, magicians and freemasons. Old Biddy Early\u2019s power came from the\nsame thing.\u201d Here\u2019s a short excerpt from the book, by one Daniel Curtin: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDid I\never hear of Biddy Early? There\u2019s not a man in this countryside over forty year\nold that hasn\u2019t been with her some time or other. There\u2019s a man living in that\nhouse over there was sick one time, and he went to her, and she cured him, but\nsays she, \u2018You\u2019ll have to lose something and don\u2019t fret after it.\u2019 So he had a\ngray mare and she was going to foal, and one morning when he went out he saw\nthe foal was born, and was lying dead by the side of the wall. So he remembered\nwhat she said to him and he didn\u2019t fret.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These stories came from a people marginalized for generations, whose beliefs in the old ways were as strong then as they were in ancient times. In fact, I met a woman in her 50s no more than two weeks ago who spent her childhood in the countryside around Tipperary. She told me that none of the farmers when she was growing up would dare to disturb ringforts on their lands \u2013 believed to be home to the Sidhe, the fairies. She remembers when one farmer destroyed a fort to make way for more grazing land, and his cattle became sick in droves. \u201cIt\u2019s best to leave the fairies alone,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even more\nremarkable, to my mind, Gregory agreed to take on a project translating some of\nthe writings in Old Irish by the monks at the dawn of the Common Era. These are\nthe earliest written records of the great sagas as well as the early oral\nhistories of the Irish otherworld.  The\nresult of her effort includes her works \u201cCuchulain of Muirthenme,\u201d about the\ndeeds of the great Irish warrior Cuchulain (pronounced Cu Cullen); and \u201cGods\nand Fighting Men,\u201d which chronicles the coming of the Tuatha De Danaan (pronounced\nTU-ah de dahn-an), the people of the goddess Danu, a magical race with\nsupernatural powers (think Biddy Early). Earlier English translations from the\nOld Irish were reportedly stilted \u2013 particularly to the rank and file Irish\nperson whose history they chronicled. Undaunted, she used a type of English she\ncalled \u201cKiltartanese,\u201d a vernacular version of the language that would make her\ntranslation accessible to the average person. They were wildly successful,\nthese books, as you can imagine. A friend of hers at the time said, \u2018She did\nfor the old Irish sagas what Mallory did for the Knights of the Round table.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is that for a legacy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gregory\nlived to the ripe old age of 80, dying in 1932 at Coole Park. You may\nrecall that in my second blog I introduced you to Tom Neilan, the wonderful\nmusician who lives near the cottage where I was quarantining just outside of\nGort. It turns out his father, like his grandfather and great-grandfather\nbefore him, was a tenant at Coole Park, and he grew up playing in the woods and\nfields there. The house and grounds were sold to the Irish Land Commission,\nwhich demolished the house in 1941 \u2013 an act Neilan told an interviewer was \u201ca\nnational disgrace.\u201d Today, there is only the barest portion of outside wall to\nmark where all those amazing talents once stayed and wrote. However, a\nmagnificent copper beach tree still stands, called the \u201cautograph tree\u201d because\nCoole Park guests etched their names on the trunk. It is in her \u201cwalled garden,\u201d\na 4.5-acre tract where she grew many unusual plants and flowers and which was a\nsolace to her. On the day I visited, families were taking advantage of a sunny\nday to picnic on the grounds there. It was a comforting sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wrote\nin her journal not long before her death, \u201cI know I have left a sheaf that contains its quota of golden grain; I\nhave been but the reaper, the ripened ears came from the poor, the people; the\nsun that ripened the harvest comes from beyond the world. I can claim\ndiligence, and love \u2013 for the work \u2013 for the people \u2013 for the Abbey \u2013 for\nIreland \u2013 that \u2018constraineth me\u2019 to do such service as I may.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am indebted to the website Fembio, the Irish Times, coolepark.ie, oral historian Turtle Bunbury at turtlehistory.com. and Gregory herself, among others, for providing my insights into her life and times.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n