AUGUSTA PERSSE, the youngest daughter, seemed likely to end her days looking after her mother, carrying outsmall domestic duties and engaging in local philanthropy; but to the surprise of her family and local land owning society, she married, after an elliptical and cautious courtship, Sir William Gregory, a widower who was 35 years her senior.
She was 27, had been reared in an atmosphere of strict evangelical Protestantism, and had no experience of those upper echelons of London society in which her husband moved; but she soon learned to adapt to her new position as mistress of the Coole estate and as hostess to a distinguished circle of friends. Indeed, it is hard to think of her now as anything but Lady Gregory.
She kept extensive diaries during her married years, the dutiful records of a dutiful wife, details of travels and social engagements, but it was only after her husband's death that a more personal note begins to emerge. The diaries here published cover the first ten years of her widowhood, after which the entries peter out as she becomes more and more actively involved in the Irish literary renaissance.
During those years, from the age of 39 to 49, she gradually moved from a unionist position to a nationalist one, without, however, relinquishing a somewhat paternalistic attitude towards the tenants of her estate. Her aim was to preserve the estate for her son Robert, aged 14 at the time of the following entry:
I feel so glad that another summer having gone by, we are still on good terms with our people - We had the school feast (122 children) and the Workhouse party - And all the people are nice & cordial, & bring little presents for Robert as of old - Little Rourke was in the Workhouse Infirmary & Robert went to see him there & gave him one of his own 5/- pieces, & distributed sugar sticks to him & the old men ...
Lady Gregory attended many social occasions when in London, tedious to attend and tedious to read about; the most interesting entries concern Coole. What exactly should one make of this? - "Mrs. Prendergast has given up the idea of buying her son out of the army - but wants money advanced to buy a cow - & we are doing this for her." Lady Gregory had refused to lend her £10 to buy out her son who had enlisted a refusal on the grounds that he seemed to be a professional poacher.
Both London and Coole come to life after Lady Gregory encounters W.B. Yeats, George Moore and other colourful personalities. Almost from the start she mothers the poet, lighting his fire and feeding him when he was sick, and helping him in practical ways "To see Yeats, took sandwiches & lunched there, & then he begged me to stay & hang his pictures, & went out for hammer & nails & wire, & we arranged and got them up.
As may be imagined, she did not like Maud Gonne: James Pethica notes "a recurrent pattern of antipathy to women in general, and to the wives of men she admired in particular". She wrote to John Quinn: "I should be content to have Jack Yeats and Douglas Hyde here for six months of the year, but a few weeks of their wives makes me hide in the woods and I have felt the same with AE and his wife ..." George Moore had no wife to queer his pitch, but Lady Gregory disapproved of his influence on Yeats and found him rather comical; she relished a description of him looking "like a boiled ghost".
The Diaries will be of more interest to the student than to the general reader, but the browser may well chance on charming vignettes: ". . . I took the two poets [Yeats and AE] across the lake to the cromlech & there they sat until they saw a purple clad Druid appear." Lady Gregory saw herself as Martha, not granted visions, and it may have been her hands that did the rowing.