No two writers were more central to the Irish Literary Revival than W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Together they collected folklore, publishing influential volumes such as Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight and Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne. They also helped establish an Irish national theater, serving as directors and managers as well as supplying many of the company’s most popular plays, sometimes in collaboration. For Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan, for instance, Lady Gregory wrote the final stirring patriotic scene, about which Yeats later wrote, “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” It was Yeats who urged J. M. Synge to travel to the Aran Islands off Ireland’s west coast, where Synge found the stories central to many of his plays and his prose masterpiece, The Aran Islands. Yeats’s close friend George Russell (Æ) served as another kind of godfather to the Literary Revival, not only encouraging a young James Joyce but also shepherding dozens of new writers into print, including Padraic Colum, James Stephens, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Seamus O’Sullivan, and later Patrick Kavanagh. It was a period of artistic cross-pollination and fermentation.
W. B. Yeats.The Shadowy Waters.London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1900.
Inscribed by Maud Gonne to nationalist journalist and poet Anna Johnston, aka Ethna Carberry: “To Anna with best love & Xmas greetings from Maud 1900.”
This is the first publication of a play that ultimately came to be described as a permanent work in progress through its many revisions. Johnston, who wrote under the name Carberry, was a founding member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, the revolutionary women’s organisation led by Gonne. She published poetry, helped edit and publish several nationalist literary journals, and collaborated with Gonne in writing and performing patriotic plays around Ireland.
Vintage studio photograph. From the estate of W. B. Yeats, with “Cuala Industries” stamp and George Yeats’s annotation, “Return to Mrs Yeats.”
Maud Gonne, leading activist for Irish nationhood, rejected Yeats’s proposals of marriage at least four times. Yeats’s complicated personal life is illustrated by this photo of his most important muse, which was lent by his widow, George, also the best friend of the daughter of one of Yeats’s lovers, Olivia Shakespear.
James Joyce.“The Day of the Rabblement.”In Two Essays. Dublin: Gerrard Bros., 1901.
In his second appearance in print, James Joyce attacked the Irish Literary Theatre for catering to popular audiences and for its refusal to produce plays by modern, European writers like Henrik Ibsen. Ireland, he wrote, “affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad.” After his essay’s rejection at his college’s journal, Joyce had it privately published together with one by his schoolboy friend, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, who was later executed during the Easter Rising.
Edited by W. B. Yeats.A Book of Irish Verse.Revised edition. London: Methuen and Co., 1900.
Inscribed: “Rev. Stopford Brooke from W.B. Yeats March 25th ’00.”
This anthology is a revised edition of the 1895 first edition, which controversially reset the canon of Irish poetry as part of Yeats’s effort to create an Irish cultural nationalism. At the time of the publication of this edition, one journalist described Yeats as “the first Irishman of the day.” Stoppard Brooke was the editor of an Irish poetry anthology that appeared later in 1900.
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.
Programme, Opening Night, The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, December 27, 1904.
Included in this programme are performances ofOn Baile’s Strand (Yeats), Spreading the News (Lady Gregory), Kathleen ni Houlihan (Yeats), and In the Shadow of the Glen (Synge).
Edited by Lady Gregory.Ideals in Ireland.London: At The Unicorn, 1901.
Essays by A.E., D. P. Moran, George Moore, Standish O’Grady, Douglas Hyde, and W. B. Yeats.
This compendium of essays by the leaders of the Irish Literary Revival was edited by Lady Gregory, who in many ways was the Revival’s guiding spirit. It encapsulated in one volume the successes and future direction of Irish literary nationalism.
Pencil drawing. Inscribed by the artist, “Lady Gregory.”
John Butler Yeats, Yeats’s father, left a budding career as a lawyer in 1867 to become a portrait painter. His impracticality as a businessman and inability to finish his work in timely fashion severely limited his success and often left his family in straitened circumstances. Although he was somewhat jealous of Lady Gregory’s management of his eldest son, he greatly admired her pragmatism and deeply appreciated the patronage and encouragement she also gave to both him and his son Jack. He made several drawings of her before he left Ireland to live in New York City in 1906, highlighting the simple style with which she usually appeared, unadorned and dressed in black.
Lady Gregory. Preface by W. B. Yeats.Cuchulain of Muirthemne.London: John Murray, 1902.
In this first edition of a cornerstone of the Irish Revival, Lady Gregory retells the Irish national epic the Táin bó Cúailnge, by creating a version of it in a local dialect she called Kiltartan. In his preface, Yeats calls the book “the best to come out of Ireland in my lifetime.”
Draft typescript with revisions in W. B. Yeats’s hand.Preface to Cuchalain of Muirthemne, 1902.
In Dramatis Personae, written after Lady Gregory’s death, Yeats recalled that she was at first “friend and hostess, a centre of peace, an adviser . . . but neither she nor we thought her a possible creator.” With the publication of Cuchulain of Muirthemne, however, “now all in a moment, it seemed, she became the founder of Irish dialect literature.”
Typed letter signed to Lady Gregory from Theodore Roosevelt regarding her book Cuchulain of Muirthemne.Washington, D.C., June 8, 1903.
In a note to John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which was widely published in Irish and American newspapers in May 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt mentioned having read and enjoyed Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne. She swiftly sent him a copy of her newly published collection of folktales and plays, Poets and Dreamers—to which this letter is Roosevelt’s reply. This began a long correspondence and friendship, with Gregory visiting the Roosevelts during her trips to America. When the Abbey Theatre’s touring company faced violent protests against J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1911, Roosevelt offered her pivotal support by escorting her to the theater and conspicuously sitting beside her.
Autograph letter signed by James Joyce to Lady Gregory, [November 22, 1902].
In this letter, written a week before his first departure from Ireland—a time memorialized at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—20-year-old James Joyce asks Lady Gregory for her help to study medicine in Paris. She in response provided him with contacts in Paris and an introduction to W. B. Yeats. In this central early letter, Joyce positions himself “against the powers of the world,” and ends with a declaration: “Though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”
Samhain, Issue No. 2.Dublin: Sealy, Bryers, and Walker, 1902.
With pencil sketches by John Butler Yeats of James Joyce while at Irish Literary Theatre, signed in his early hand, “Jas. A Joyce.”
In October 1902, George Russell (“AE”) wrote to Yeats, “The spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer.” Yeats agreed to meet Joyce, and AE’s warning proved accurate. As he left, Joyce, aged twenty-two, imperiously declared that Yeats, aged thirty-seven, was “too old” to be helped. Joyce firmly rejected any invitations to become part of the literary movement. Yet he attended the opening of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen and memorized some passages, which he later threaded into his novels. In 1912, on a rare visit to Dublin, Joyce wrote to Nora, his wife: “The Abbey Theater will be open and they will give plays of Yeats and Synge. … I am one of the writers of this generation who are perhaps creating at last a conscience in the soul of this wretched race.”
W. B. Yeats.The Celtic Twilight.Revised and enlarged edition. London: John Murray, 1902.
Inscribed: “To Lady Gregory from W.B.Yeats July 7 1902.”With her bookplate.
First published in 1893 by W. B. Yeats, this revised edition exemplifies in book form the close collaboration between him and Lady Gregory, who is uncredited but with whom he collected much of the folklore in the west of Ireland.
Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw at Coole Park, 1910.
Vintage photograph. Inscribed by Lady Gregory.
During summer trips to Ireland, George Bernard Shaw visited Lady Gregory’s home at Coole Park three times, including a notable four-week stay in 1915. He inscribed his initials in her famous beech tree and made photographs of Coole Lake and the surrounding area as well as of Lady Gregory and her friends and family. Admiring Lady Gregory deeply, he called her “the greatest living Irishwoman.”
Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
After the death of her husband, Lady Gregory used their Galway estate, Coole Park, to host all the key figures in the Irish Literary Revival, who inscribed their initials on a beech tree that still stands on its grounds. W. B. Yeats spent parts of nineteen summers working at Coole, and in his poem “Coole 1929,” he writes: “Here traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand, / When all these rooms and passages are gone / When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound / And saplings root among the broken stone.”
Lady Gregory.Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, and Co., Ltd. London: John Murray, 1903.
Inscribed: “A. Gregory.”
Lady Gregory’s own copy of her selection of explications and translations of Irish folktales and ballads, with her bookplate, opens with two elderly women reminiscing about the blind Irish bard Anthony Raftery, whose Gaelic verses in the 1800s led to his reputation as Ireland’s Homer. The volume includes translations from the Gaelic of several plays on Irish folk themes by Douglas Hyde, the future first President of an independent Ireland, writing under his Gaelic pen name, An Craoibhín Aoibhinn, which means “the delightful little branch.”
[George Russell].New Songs: A Lyric Selection Made by A.E.Dublin: O’Donoghue & Co. and A. H. Bullen, 1904.
Signed by George Russell, with the ownership signature of Padraic Colum.
George Russell (AE), close friend of W. B. Yeats and a guiding force in the Irish Literary Revival, helped countless young writers into print, including Padraic Colum, Seamus O’Sullivan, and later Patrick Kavanagh. In New Songs, he presents poems of eight young poets but excludes the young James Joyce, a slight that Joyce carries into the ninth episode of Ulysses. Nevertheless, also in Ulysses, Joyce remembers the hours “AE” spent trying to help him as a young man, writing: “A.E.I.O.U.” Padraic Colum was a poet, playwright, novelist, friend of James Joyce, and a director of the Abbey Theatre.
W. B. Yeats.Poems 1899–1905.London: A. H. Bullen; Dublin: Maunsel & Co., Ltd., 1906.
Inscribed “To Lady Gregory from her friend the writer Oct 15 1906.” With a quatrain added below the inscription, July 21,1907.
This was Yeats’s first collection of poems in six years. The handsome gilt spine of the binding reflects Yeats’s status by this time as one of the most esteemed English-language poets of his day. Many of the poems and the play Shadowy Waters contained in this volume were written or conceived during Yeats’s annual summer sojourns at Lady Gregory’s Galway estate, Coole Park, making the inscription to her particularly meaningful.
Autograph letter signed by J. M. Synge to Hugh Lane, December 29, 1907.
Sir Hugh Lane, nephew of Lady Gregory, was a dynamic and pioneering figure in the art scene in London and Dublin of the early 1900s, becoming one of the most prominent collectors and dealers of French Impressionist paintings of his day. Determined to bring contemporary art to Ireland, he opened the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in early 1908, the world’s first public gallery devoted to modern art, which Synge describes visiting in this letter. Lane proposed a permanent building for the collection, to be operated by the Dublin city government.
Prefatory Note by Hugh P. Lane.Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Illustrated Catalogue with Biographical and Critical Notes.Dublin: Dollard Printing House, 1908.
Signed and dated by John Quinn, New York, Nov. 26, 1909.
This volume connects two of the most influential figures in both the Irish cultural scene of the first decades of the Twentieth Century as well as in the art world of that period. Lane’s gallery opened like a thunderclap in Dublin, both inspiring and shocking the Irish cultural world. Quinn, a wealthy Irish American lawyer, not only helped support and publish the most important figures of the Irish Literary Revival, he also built one of the most significant French modern art collections of his day, rivaling that of Lane.
Lady Gregory.Hugh Lane’s Life and Achievement.London: John Murray, 1921.
Inscribed by the author.
Shockingly, Lane died, aged thirty-nine, in the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 as he was returning from a visit to New York. He had become the director of the National Gallery of Ireland a year earlier, as the Dublin city council narrowly rejected his proposal to create a permanent home for the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art he had established, to be operated by the city of Dublin. Lady Gregory, his aunt, wrote this elegiac biography, keeping alive both his memory and the struggle to establish a modern art museum in Ireland.
Thomas Bodkin.Hugh Lane and his Pictures.Dublin: Brown and Nolan; London: Geo. G. Harrup, 1934.
Inscribed by W. B. Yeats’ sisters, “To Aunt Fanny with love / from Lily Yeats / Lolly Yeats / Christmas 1938.” “Aunt Fanny” is Fanny Yeats Gordon, youngest sister of Lilly and Lolly’s father, J. B. Yeats.
Hugh Lane, angered by the failure of Dublin to support the Municipal Gallery, had written a will in 1913 bequeathing almost forty paintings to the National Gallery in London. Then, only months before he died, he wrote an unwitnessed codicil instead sending them to Ireland.Legal proceedings validated the original will. The author, Thomas Bodkin, then the director of Ireland’s National Gallery, spent decades trying to get the pictures to Ireland. Initial steps were finally taken in 1959 to share the paintings between London and Dublin and only in 1993 were thirty-one of them permanently transferred to Ireland, with the remaining eight paintings continuing to alternate cities.
“Sold by the Irish Players at $1.00 Towards A Building to Save Sir Hugh Lane’s Pictures for Ireland, April 1913.”
Promotional pictorial handkerchief printed on linen. With printed drawings of many of the Abbey Theatre’s players and directors.
The unsuccessful fight from 1908 through 1914 to get funding for the Municipal Gallery highlights fault lines among the participants in the Irish Literary Revival and the political struggle against the British. Many participants promoted not just Irish identity and freedom but also a vision of modernity in the culture and the society at large. Other participants rejected that view and had a deeply conservative vision of the meaning of Irish myths, pushing for the return of the primacy of the Catholic Church in Irish society and politics. These divisions would reappear after the founding of the Irish Republic.
Ella Young. Maud Gonne, illustrator.Celtic Wonder-Tales.Dublin: Maunsel, 1910.
Signed by Gonne with her initials and a mythological hand-drawn ornament in black ink.
Maud Gonne became close friends with Ella Young, Irish-born mystic and poet, who was imprisoned several times for her Republican sympathies. Young left Ireland in 1925, disillusioned by the Civil War, and moved to America, where she lectured on Irish mythology and literature.
Alvin Langdon Coburn.W. B. Yeats. 1908.
Vintage photogravure.
This portrait of W. B. Yeats by American photographer Alvin Landon Coburn appeared in his renowned collection of 1913, Men of Mark.
J. M. Synge, with drawings by Jack B. Yeats.Aran Islands.London & Dublin: Elkin Mathews; London: Maunsel & Co., Ltd., 1907.
The large paper edition, one of 150 signed by Synge and Jack Yeats, who hand-colored the original illustrations.
In 1902, W. B. Yeats famously advised John Synge to give up Paris and go to the Aran Islands, to “live there as if you were one of the people themselves.” Synge spent five summers on those islands off Galway’s coast and drew inspiration for his moody prose masterpiece The Aran Islands, as well as for four of the plays that became foundations of the Abbey Theatre, including The Playboy of the Western World.
