Isabella Augusta (Persse) Gregory Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Isabella Augusta (Persse) Gregory

Lady Gregory is perhaps primarily responsible for the development of Irish national drama. Together with William Butler Yeats, she founded the Irish Literary Theatre, which later became the Irish National Theatre Society at the Abbey Theatre, in 1899, when she was a middle-aged widow. For thirty-four years, until she died at age eighty, she remained its chief organizer, most ardent supporter, and most prolific playwright, although she had written no plays and had little interest in theater during the years of her marriage.

Born Isabella Augusta Persse, she was the youngest daughter of Dudley and Frances Barry Persse of Roxborough, county Galway, Ireland. She was privately educated. Her marriage in 1880 to Sir William Gregory, former governor of Ceylon and well-known Irish member of parliament, lasted twelve years until his death in 1892. The couple had a son, William Robert.

Lady Gregory's interest in developing a theater in Dublin was initially nationalist in intention--she thought of it as "preparing for Home Rule"--and in the early years of the Irish dramatic movement she was content to solicit support from titled friends and established writers, to promote the theater in the press, to serve on its board of directors, and to collaborate generously--and anonymously--with Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and others. But "the desire for experiment is like fire in the blood," she wrote, and once she turned to writing plays of her own, she was constantly at work writing, revising, and producing comedies, tragedies, and "wonder plays"--fantasies for children--for the Abbey repertory.

Her themes were invariably drawn from Irish history or from her keen sense of character in daily life. She was at her best with one-act plays, whether comic or tragic, and her Spreading the News (1904), The Gaol Gate (1906), and The Rising of the Moon (1907) are classic examples of their form. Her use of dialect, copied from the local speech of the Kiltartan countryside, prompted John Millington Synge to attempt Gaelic idiom in his own plays, and she was proud that Eugene O'Neill had said he had decided to try dialect himself after seeing the Abbey players on tour in the United States.

Besides writing original dramas, Lady Gregory translated Molière and other European masters into the Kiltartan dialect for production at the Abbey, encouraged such fledgling playwrights as Sean O'Casey, and continued to collaborate with other Abbey authors. She worked most closely with Yeats. In 1922 he wrote that she had shared substantially in the construction of all but two of his plays. She also helped many younger Abbey playwrights revise their work for production.

Her plays have been translated into many languages and have been popular with little theater groups in many countries, probably because her vision is essentially humorous and optimistic. Her dramas have the authenticity of folktale, and even at their darkest they affirm the invincibility of the human spirit. She was not so much a chronicler of her times as an observer of eternal truths, and as a result her plays have a durable quality about them. The recent republication of all of them in the Coole edition of her work has brought Lady Gregory back into prominence as not only an important historical figure in modern drama but also as a writer of great skill.