It’s the birthday of Irish writer Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852 – 1932), known for her plays, translations, and leading role in the Irish cultural and literary renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a great friend and patron of William Butler Yeats and was once called “the greatest living Irishwoman” by George Bernard Shaw.

Gregory was born Isabella Augusta Persse in Roxborough, Co. Galway, Ireland, and became Lady Gregory upon her marriage to Sir William Henry Gregory in 1880. They traveled together and she began writing, but her career did not begin in earnest until Sir Gregory’s death in 1892. (Goodbye, Sir Gregory; we hardly knew ye. Well, here’s a bone or two: he was 35 years older than Lady Gregory, had a huge library at his Coole Park estate, was Governor of Ceylon for a time, and lost a good part of his inherited fortune on his lifelong horse racing addiction.)

Gregory had learned about the local legends from her nanny growing up, and now she began to collect folklore and publish the tales. Coole Park became a gathering place for important Gaelic writers. Gregory met Yeats in 1896, and in 1904 they co-founded the Abbey Theatre, which became embroiled in many censorship battles over various great plays produced there, including “The Playboy of the Western World” by John Millington Synge in 1907. (Riots broke out during a performance: the peasantry was not portrayed in an idealized light, which offended those who would “cleanse” the Irish image for patriotic purposes.) Gregory was a strong champion for artistic freedom against the government, though she presents some contradictions: she was a landowner who collected rent and tended to idealize the peasantry herself.

Gregory and Yeats co-wrote a play, “Cathleen ni Houlihan” (1902), that became a huge nationalist hit and stirred a good deal of Irish patriotism, and furthermore was good for Yeats’ reputation with the Irish Catholics (Yeats and Gregory were both Protestants). But it’s clear that Gregory wrote almost the entire play herself, save some material near the end, and let Yeats take official credit. (Sigh.)

Gregory’s only son, Robert, was killed in WWI in 1917. His grieving mother asked Yeats to write something to memorialize him, and Yeats responded with “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” considered one of his greatest poems. It begins:

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate

Those that I guard I do not love…

Read the entire poem, have a pleasant Thursday, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.