Search Results for 'Augusta'

Nothing shut the mouths of the Irish yahoos faster than to see Augusta Lady Gregory enter the Maxine Elliot Theatre, New York, arm in arm with Teddy Roosevelt, probably America’s greatest president. Their jaws must have hit the floor in amazement as they were well prepared for a total assault on the Abbey Theatre’s presentation of the Playboy of the Western World, and on its ‘pensioner’ spokesperson Lady Gregory.

Augusta Lady Gregory, writer, folklorist and great patron of the arts, who died at her home at Coole Park in 1932, reappeared during the Druid production of five of her plays each evening this week. Druid is no stranger to magic, and such is their skill that Lady Gregory (Marie Mullen) makes several appearances inviting the audience to follow her for yet another of her plays performed in different locations around her home. From the edge of Coole lake to the old stables and yards, her ghostly figure seductively beckoned. The audience followed enchanted, moved by the strange power of her deceptively simple plays.

In April 1902 Augusta Lady Gregory was working hard at her home at Coole, translating from Irish the myths and legends of Ireland. Somebody had dubbed Coole ‘the workshop of Ireland’, and the phrase went straight to her heart. Her pride in it glows in her letters to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, her one-time lover and life-long friend, and admirer.*

Augusta Lady Gregory, and her husband Sir William, were away in Italy in May 1888, when her former lover Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was imprisoned in Galway for participating in an anti-eviction rally at Woodford the previous October. I described last week, that within two days of her return to Galway she visited his empty cell, and remained sometime.*

The affair between Augusta Lady Gregory and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the romantic traveller, poet and a somewhat eccentric man addicted to political causes, lasted one year. It carried on almost under the eyes of her husband Sir William. He did not notice it, or if he did, he chose not to notice it.

Isabella Augusta Persse (later Lady Gregory), grew up in Roxborough House, Co Galway, a large rambling estate house, with magnificent gardens, commanding some 18,000 acres over which her father Dudley Persse presided with almost feudal authority. His 13 children knew their wheel-chaired bound father as The Master.*