Augusta, Lady Gregory

Augusta, Lady Gregory (born Isabella Augusta Persse, Roxborough, County Galway, 1852 – Coole Park, County Galway, 1932) was an Anglo-Irish playwright and collector of folklore. She wrote in English at a time when Ireland was under British rule, and her name is tied to the Irish Literary Revival. She matters less for her own plays than for the way she helped build a national theatre and shape a literature that looked back to Ireland's own past.

She was born into the Anglo-Irish gentry, a class that tended to identify closely with British government. She was educated at home, and as a child she heard local legends from her nurse, Mary Sheridan, a Catholic and a native Irish speaker. In 1880 she married Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower more than thirty years her senior and a former Governor of Ceylon. After his death in 1892 she settled for good at Coole Park. Her early writings took a very different political line from her later ones: a pamphlet of 1882 defended the Egyptian nationalist Urabi, and a later one opposed Irish self-government. A trip to the Aran Islands in 1893 revived her interest in the Irish language and folklore, and from then on her work turned toward cultural nationalism.

Her collecting led to books of folk tales and retellings of Irish myth, such as Cuchulain of Muirthemne. She wrote these in a English that carried Gaelic syntax, drawn from the speech of Kiltartan, the district around her home, so that the old stories would sound close to ordinary readers. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn she helped found the Irish Literary Theatre and later the Abbey Theatre, for which she wrote many short plays, among them Spreading the News, performed on the Abbey's opening night in 1904.

Her lasting contribution lies largely in organisation. Coole Park became a meeting place for the leading figures of the Revival, and her work on the Abbey's board was at least as important to the theatre's growth as her own writing. Her motto, attributed to Aristotle, sums up her aim: to think like a wise person but speak like everyday people.