Augusta, Lady Gregory

Isabella Augusta Persse married into the Anglo-Irish ascendancy in 1852, but by middle age had broken with her class's loyalties entirely. With Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, writing dozens of short works for both stages. Her estate at Coole Park in County Galway became the gathering place for the Irish Literary Revival's key figures, and her work as a board member proved as crucial to the Abbey's survival as anything she wrote for it. She retold Irish myths in a series of books, pulling old stories into plain language. As a solo playwright she's remembered for Spreading the News, a one-act comedy that opened the Abbey in 1904, and Grania eight years later; she also co-wrote Cathleen ni Houlihan with Yeats in 1902. Her motto, lifted from Aristotle, was her method: "To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people." She died at Coole Park on 22 May 1932, having lived the contradiction her generation couldn't resolve.