It was on this day in 1975 that the Homebrew Computer Club first met in a garage near Menlo Park in the Silicon Valley. Her place provided inspiration for a number of his poems, including “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “I walked among the seven woods of Coole,” “In the Seven Woods,” “Coole Park, 1929,” and “Coole Park and Ballylee.” Yeats’s friendship with Lady Gregory was “the great enabling relationship of his life.” In his early years, she was his patron, and even after he’d become rich and famous, he continued to spend summers at her Coole estate in western Ireland. She wrote about 20 plays of her own, and she did so much working and rewriting of some of Yeats’s plays for the Abbey Theatre - coming up with peasant dialogue, and such - that some scholars suggest she essentially co-authored some of Yeats’s early plays for the Abbey, including The Countess Cathleen. The first play to have its premier at the Abbey was one that Lady Gregory herself had written, Spreading the News. It first took shape as the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 and a several years later morphed into the Abbey Theatre. They decided to start an official movement dedicated to reviving Irish folklore. Yeats was also very interested in folklore of the Irish peasantry, and like Lady Gregory he hailed from a landed Protestant family. Yeats, and began a friendship that would last for nearly 40 years, for the rest of her life. It was through a neighbor of hers at Coole that she met W.B. She would end up publishing several volumes of this folk material, including A Book of Saints and Wonders (1906), The Kiltartan History Book (1909), and The Kiltartan Wonder Book (1910). She started Irish classes, and she began collecting tales and folklore from along the countryside she was especially interested in what she called “Kiltartanese,” English spoken with a Gaelic syntax, and prevalent in Kiltartan, an area of Galway. She returned to their Coole Park home in Galway and spent the next year editing the autobiography he’d written, getting it ready for publication. But then her husband died just 12 years into their marriage, around her 40th birthday, and she was grief-stricken. They had a house in London too, and they spent a lot of time there entertaining in their living room poets Robert Browning and Lord Tennyson and writer Henry James. During their marriage, she sat and worked on a memoir and wrote some short stories and poems, but she published almost none of them. She moved into his estate at Coole in County Galway and spent a lot of time exploring her new shared library. So when they got married, she took the title “Lady” along with his last name, Gregory. He’d also been knighted by the British Empire. She helped lead the Irish Literary Revival in the early 20th century and she co-founded, along with Yeats, the Abbey Theatre.Īt age 28, she married a man who was 35 years her elder - he was 63, well-educated with a large library and art collection, a former member of the Irish parliament, and once the governor of British-controlled Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Shaw called “the greatest Irishwoman.” Lady Gregory was born Isabella Augusta Persse on this day in 1852 (some sources say March 15) in Roxborough, County Tipperary, Ireland. Yeats’s early patron, long-term and most loyal friend, a woman G.B. It’s the birthday of a playwright and folklorist who was also W.B.
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