Book description
 It is the battle between those who use a toothbrush and those who
don't.' So wrote Augusta Gregory to W. B. Yeats; she was referring to
the riots at the Abbey Theatre over The Playboy of the Western World,
and she knew which side she was on. In this remarkable biographical
essay, Colm ToÃbÃn examines the contradictions that defined the
position of this essential figure in Irish cultural history, The wife
of a landlord and MP who had been personally responsible for
introducing measures that compounded the misery of the Irish peasantry
during the Great Famine, Lady Gregory devoted much of her creative
energy to idealizing the same peasantry Â- while never abandoning the
aristocratic hauteur, the social connections or the great house which
her birth and marriage had bequeathed her. Early in her writing life,
her politics were staunchly unionist Â- yet she campaigned for the
freedom of Egypt from colonial rule. Later she wrote plays celebrating
rebellion, but trembled in her bed when the Irish revolution
threatened her property and her way of life. Lady Gregory's capacity
to occupy mutually contradictory positions was essential to her heroic
work as a founder and director of the Abbey Theatre Â- nurturing Synge
and O'Casey, battling rioters and censors Â- and to her central role
in the career of W. B. Yeats. She was Yeats's artistic collaborator
(writing most of Cathleen NÃ Houlihan, for example), his helpmeet,
and his diplomatic wing. ToÃbÃn's account of Yeats's attemts Â- by
turns glorious and graceless Â- to memorize Lady Gregory's son Robert
when he was killed in the First World War, and of Lady Gregory's pain
at her loss and at the poet's appropriation of it, is a moving tour de
force of literary history. ToÃbÃn 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 affain with
the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfred 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 arts John Quinn, who was eighteen years her
junior. Lady Gregory's Toothbrush is a sharp, concentrated, witty and
much-needed reassessment of a major cultural figure who has been oddly
taken for granted and often badly misunderstood.
