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 Toibin 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 ...
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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 Toibin 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 that same peasantry - while never abandoning the aristocratic hauteur, the social connections or the great house which her birth and marriage had bequeathed to her. Early in her writing life, her politics were staunchly unionist as regarded Ireland - 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 - nurturing Synge and O'Casey, battling rioters and censors - and to her central role in the career of W.B. Yeats. Toibin also reveals a side of Lady Gregory that is at odds with the received image of a chilly dowager: her capacity to love and be loved by men. Early in her marriage to Sir William Gregory, she had an affair 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 the 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.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good. Size: 9x6x1; The Lilliput Press; Dublin, 2002. Hardcover. Signed by author directly on front free endpaper. A Near Fine, black cloth binding with gilt lettering on spine, binding firm, interior and extremities tidy, mild handling marks/shelf wear, minimal scattered foxing top text block edge, in a Near Fine, trace handling/scuff marks to panels, mild edge/corner wear, a hint of sunning to flaps, price sticker bottom front flap, Mylar protected, Dust wrapper. A nice and clean copy. 8vo[octavo or approx. 6 x 9 inches], 127pp., sources, acknowledgements, b&w illustrations. We pack securely and ship daily with delivery confirmation on every book. The picture on the listing page is of the actual book for sale. Additional Scan(s) are available for any item, please inquire.
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Fine in Fine jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. The second printing, 125 pages. "In this remarkable biographicaly essay, the author examines the contraditions the defined the position of this essential figure in Irish cultural history." FINE HARDCOVER, FIND DUST JACKET.