Yesterday I went to the Gort Library housed in a tiny old church and only open 3 hours 4 days a week. I was able to use all their “not to be checked out” sources in 3 hours. I did get free parking when I left briefly to feed the meter, the librarian said to pull my car up behind hers in the courtyard, she wouldn’t be leaving before me.
I then walked on the grounds of Lady Augusta Gregory, a woman responsible for reinvigorating Irish literary culture and founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Her 12,000 acre homestead is only 4 km from where I am staying. I have mixed feelings about her and her contributions. From an aristocratic, land owning family (Peresse’s of the whiskey business and Indian tea company) with many tenants during the famine years and land wars, though she contributed greatly to preserving literature (she was a close friend with Yeats) and had the equivalent of a salon and was a patron for many authors and artists (nephew was an art dealer as well) (she has an autograph tree in her walled garden), she also treated the tenants as any other land owner in Ireland did during those times, she was not helpful to them at all. Her husband took their land and began using it for cow pastures as well. Then she began to write her own plays and produced them in her own theatre, the Abbey theatre. Her talent was often hidden behind that of Yeats but then again, I am not sure she had talent to do on her own what others had done if it had not been for her money. That said, she was Yeats patron and could he have made it had she not paid for him. Ah…money and the arts. I walked about the land now taken over by a preservation group. The house was demolished during the land wars but the stables still stand as do the trees and garden areas. Then I began to think that of course she could finance the arts, she had little to do at home with a full staff and overseers (she did the books) and was protected in the middle of 12,000 acres on the coast of Ireland. What we might do if we had the money.
Leara Rhodes 