Lady Gregory

Hazard Adams

1973
103 pages
ISBN 0-8387-1085-9
Irish Writers Series

Lady Gregory is another contribution to the Irish Writers Series. These monographs have been designed to treat in individual volumes the significant Anglo-Irish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. These studies will prove helpful to literary scholars and to students of literature. When complete the series will constitute a significant history of modern Anglo-Irish literature, encompassing discussions of more than 50 writers.

Lady Gregory (1852-1932) has long been stereotypes as a writer for the Abbey Theatre, but she was more than that; she was a re-creator of Irish myth and transmitter of folklore, especially in her wonder plays and plays for children. From all her plays, however, "we learn that history is made our of fundamental human relationships, of the clash of wills, of the passions of domestic life," writes Dr. Aams, to which he adds: "Lady Gregory's mythological history looks into the plight of a people, turns the coin over so that the tragedy and comedy, the image and the reality, the loyalty and the self-serving may be confronted under the pressure of history."

With more than thirty-five plays to her credit, besides two written in collaboration with Yeats, this dedicated and prolific artist, the "founder of modern dialect literature" (Yeat's phrase), deserves this fine critical assessment by Dr. Adams.

About the author:

Hazard Adams was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in Seattle, Washington. He took his B.A. at Princeton and M.A. and Ph.A. at the University of Washington. He has taught at Cornell, Texas, and Michigan State, and is now at the University of California, Irvine, where he is Professor of English and Vice-Chancellor. He has published two novels-The Horses of Instruction (1968) and The Truth About Dragons (1971) - and is at work on a third. Among his books of criticism are Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (1955), William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (1963), and The Interests of Criticism (1969). He has studied in Ireland on two occasions, the latter in 1962 when he was Fulbright Lecturer and Research Scholar at Trinity College, Dublin.