Notebook with “Cathleen ni Houlihan” manuscript draft by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory

Notebook with “Cathleen ni Houlihan” manuscript draft by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory

Fall 1901

With: Cathleen ni Houlihan MS page with inscription "From WBY."

“All this mine alone. A.G.,” declares Gregory’s annotation halfway through this draft of Cathleen ni Houlihan. In the play, an old woman enters a cottage on the eve of the Irish rebellion of 1798. We gradually realize she is an embodiment of Ireland and is bidding Michael, the oldest son of the house, to fight for her cause. After they leave, a neighbor says he has just seen Michael not with an old woman but with a young girl, “and she had the walk of a queen.” The play was published solely under Yeats’s name and became one of his best-known works for the theater. It spurred their years of close collaboration on plays, but Gregory long resented his insufficient acknowledgment of her contribution.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations