Colm TÃ³ibÃ­n
In this remarkable biographical essay, Colm TÃ³ibÃ­n examines the contradictions that defined Lady Gregory, an essential figure in Irish cultural history. She was the wife of a landlord and member of Parliament who had been personally responsible for introducing measures that compounded the misery of the Irish peasantry during the Great Famine. Yet, Lady Gregory devoted much of her creative energy to idealizing that same peasantry, while never abandoning the aristocratic hauteur, the social connections, or the great house that her birth and marriage had bequeathed to her.,Â Â Â  Lady Gregoryâ€™s capacity to occupy mutually contradictory positions was essential to her heroic work as a founder and director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublinâ€”nurturing Synge and Oâ€™Casey, her battles with rioters and censors, and to her central role in the career of W. B. Yeats. She was Yeatsâ€™s artistic collaborator (writing most of Cathleen NÃ­ Houlihan, for example), his helpmeet, and his diplomatic wing. TÃ³ibÃ­nâ€™s account of Yeatsâ€™s attemptsâ€”by turns glorious and gracelessâ€”to memorialize Lady Gregoryâ€™s son Robert when he was killed in the First World War, and of Lady Gregoryâ€™s pain at her loss and at the poetâ€™s appropriation of it, is a moving tour de force of literary history.,Â Â Â  TÃ³ibÃ­n also reveals a side of Lady Gregory that is at odds with the received image of a chilly dowager. Early in her marriage to Sir William Gregory, she had an affair with the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and wrote a series of torrid love sonnets that Blunt published under his own name. Much later in life, as she neared her sixtieth birthday, she fell in love with the great patron of the arts John Quinn, who was eighteen years her junior.,"It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who donâ€™t.",â€”Lady Augusta Gregory writing to W.B. Yeats, referring to the riots at the Abbey Theatre over Syngeâ€™s ,The Playboy of the Western World
Biography,Cultural,Ireland,European Literature,Irish Literature,Nonfiction,History,Autobiography,Memoir
Lady Gregory's Toothbrush