Author Description

Lennox Robinson's selection from Lady Gregory's Journals was published in 1946. It only contained a small fraction of the total material that she typed out (editing as she did so) from her manuscript diaries. In 1964 the bulk of Lady Gregory's archives were bought by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and the typescripts of her diaries, which formed part of the archive, were prepared for publication by the present editor, Daniel Murphy. The first volume of this edition, containing Books 1 to 29, was published in 1978. This second volume, containing Books 30 to 44, not only completes the typed version of her diaries (which ended in November 1930), but also adds the unedited text of the manuscript diary she kept from then until a fortnight before her death. It describes her continuing efforts to get the Lane Pictures returned to Ireland, the passing of Coole into the hands of the Irish Forestry Department, Abbey Theatre problems, the row over Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars and the break with him over its refusal of The Silver Tassie, Denis Johnston's connection with the Abbey as producer and playwright (with illuminating insights into the Abbey's refusal of The Old Lady Says 'No!’), and other controversial matters. Plagued by rheumatism and twice operated on for cancer, Lady Gregory was nevertheless determined not to give in to old age, and she relates the daily battle with her infirmities with objectivity. Thus, with W. B. Yeats's account of her last hours, ‘The Death of Lady Gregory’, published here for the first time, the reader is given a far more complete picture of the last years of Lady Gregory's life than has hitherto been available.Appended to this is an Afterword by Colin Smythe which describes the problems relating to the publication of the Journals and Autobiography following Lady Gregory’s death.