At the turn of the 20th century, Lady Augusta Gregory emerged as a key figure within the Irish Literary Revival. She was a major organiser of the theatre movement, a founder of the Abbey Theatre, and an important translator and dramatist in her own right. In Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush Irish novelist Colm Tóibín provides us with an evocative sketch of this complex figure.
Gregory was born into the Anglo-Irish landlord class, rulers by inheritance who were under increasing pressure from an emergent Catholic middle class and an indigenous nationalist movement. Inherited rule is suggested by her marriage to Sir William Gregory, an Irish landowner, former British Cabinet minister and former Governor General of Ceylon. An interest in more illicit alignments is perhaps suggested by her early affair with the prominent anti-imperialist campaigner and poet, Wilfred Scawen Blunt.
In the decade following Sir William’s death in 1892, Gregory edited his autobiography, which Tóibín regards as a key moment in her own emergence and self-invention. The Anglo–Irish image and ethos that she drew upon emphasised the traditionalist relation between landlord and tenant with its attendant duties and responsibilities. This tie between the Anglo-Irish and the native Irish was important in mediating the tension between her ruling inheritance and her increasing interest in Irish nationalism. It was an ideology that would also inform the political and poetic vision of W.B. Yeats.
Gregory would later take some satisfaction in recalling that there were no evictions from Sir William’s estate at Coole during the famine. Tóibín notes the elision here: Sir William lent his name to the infamous ‘Gregory clause,’ an amendment to the Poor Law requiring the famine stricken to abandon even the most meagre land leases before receiving relief. Sir William’s personal enlightenment and benevolence proved no guarantee against participating in government policy that caused great suffering and distress.
During the 1890s, Gregory learns the Irish language, studies Irish history and literature, visits the Aran Islands and collects Irish folklore. Under the radicalising influence of the Gaelic League, she undertakes a translation of the Cuchulain myth, partly in answer to the Trinity University professors who argued that there was little of value in indigenous literature. As Tóibín also notes, the cultural nationalism underpinning all this ethnographic and literary activity did not prevent her from maintaining her position and estate at Coole, or being aghast at radical nationalist incitements against the landlords.
Tóibín recognises that ‘inconsistencies are part of