Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920). By: Lady Gregory, and By: W. B. Yeats: With two esays and notes By: William Butler Yeats

by Lady Gregory

This material collected over a period of more than twenty years proved to be a valuable source not only for Gregory's own plays but also for Yeats' work. A classic, it presents many aspects of the supernatural seers, healers, charms, banshees, forths, the evil eye and contains a treasure trove of Irish folk-beliefs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.. Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory ( 15 March 1852 - 22 May 1932) was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime. Lady Gregory is mainly remembered for her work behind the Irish Literary Revival. Her home at Coole Park, County Galway, served as an important meeting place for leading Revival figures, and her early work as a member of the board of the Abbey was at least as important for the theatre's development as her creative writings. Lady Gregory's motto was taken from Aristotle: "To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people." Early life and marriage: Gregory was born at Roxborough, County Galway, the youngest daughter of the Anglo-Irish gentry family Persse. Her mother, Frances Barry, was related to Viscount Guillamore, and her family home, Roxborough, was a 6,000-acre (24 km) estate located between Gort and Loughrea, the main house of which was later burnt down during the Irish Civil War. She was educated at home, and her future career was strongly influenced by the family nurse (i.e. nanny), Mary Sheridan, a Catholic and a native Irish speaker, who introduced the young Augusta to the history and legends of the local area. She married Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower with an estate at Coole Park, near Gort, on 4 March 1880 in St Matthias' Church, Dublin. Sir William, who was 35 years her elder, had just retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), having previously served several terms as Member of Parliament for County Galway. He was a well-educated man with many literary and artistic interests, and the house at Coole Park housed a large library and extensive art collection, both of which Lady Gregory was eager to explore. He also had a house in London, where the couple spent a considerable amount of time, holding weekly salons frequented by many leading literary and artistic figures of the day, including Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, John Everett Millais and Henry James. Their only child, Robert Gregory, was born in 1881. He was killed during the First World War, while serving as a pilot, an event which inspired Yeats's poems "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," and "Shepherd and Goatherd.." William Butler Yeats ( 13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others....

Genres: Ireland, Irish Literature, Mythology, Spirituality, Nonfiction

118 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

Irish playwright Lady Isabella Augusta Persse Gregory wrote a number of short plays, including Spreading the News (1904) for the Abbey theater, which she founded and directed from 1904 to 1928.

This Irish dramatist and folklorist with William Butler Yeats and other persons co-founded the Irish literary theatre and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books retelling stories taken from Irish mythology.

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was excellent!
It's a collection of stories from people around the West of Ireland as told to Lady Gregory over a couple of years. Some of them are only a paragraph long and amount to, "I've never seen them, but one killed my sister," while others are a page or two and more detailed. Most are very short. It's divided into sections, like, "charms," "blacksmiths," "butter" (which I did not know was a big thing but apparently people used magic to steal butter a lot), "monsters," and a bunch more that I can't remember and my cat is sleeping adorably on the book so I can't check. Then withing those sections there was a sort of order as well, as there were many pages within one section that were entirely devoted to sightings of big, black dogs. It was super well organized and highly readable.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of this book chronicles oral traditions of fairy lore as collected and recorded by Lady Gregory, one of the guiding lights of the Celtic Renaissance. Most of these are not "fairy tales," in the sense most people understand the term, but first person accounts of encounters with the uncanny world that co-existed with rural Ireland, like a place one might enter through Machen's Hill of Dreams but wider, wilder, and unbound by literary concerns. I don't know of any work of fiction that captures that world as well as these little tales do. Some of them are more terrifying than anything classic or modern horror writers have conceived and are closer to nightmare than artifice. Others are laced with the fine spirit of blarney and are amusing in an entirely different way. Lady Gregory's portion of this volume is completely enchanting.

The concluding essay by Yeats is less delightful though interesting in a more academic way. Yeats takes the underlying assumptions of the "fairy world" and attempts to compare them to the spiritual plane as envisioned by Swedenborg and his followers and to the effects of the post-Victorian séance room. In this exercise, he almost takes the fun out of the fairy stories, but not quite.

[Jay Callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkably good 365-page book published in 1920, the fruit of many years conversations with the then Irish-speaking small farmers of south Galway and nearby north Clare. Lady Gregory was a landlord, but one long involved in the Gaelic revival, and , for some reason, people talked fairly openly to her. Certainly her own predilictions and personality filtered what she heard, but there is not a lot of author-speak or of the author in the stories. They are clear prose; basically, she says, "the very words in which the story had been told." Gregory was a mentor to Yeats, and it is interesting to compare her writing to his gushy, fulsome, ill-informed and self-centered writing on similar topics.

Sections of the book include Seers and Healers ; Away: Herbs, Charms and Wise Women: Astray, and Treasure: Banshees and Warnings: The Fighting of the Friends: Appearances: Butter: The Fool of the Forth; Forths and Sheoguey Places. There have been almost no similar books, in Irish or English. Books of individual storytellers' stories include some similar stories, but there is no colections (intelligent and well-informed) on these topics.

[George Noland II · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lady Gregory’s collection of “stories” from people around the West of Ireland as told to her and W.B. Yeats. They are generally short Irish folktales that range from one paragraph to a couple of pages. I liked one reviewers’ description of most: "I've never seen them, but one killed my sister”. It’s fascinating what stories people will conjure to justify or give meaning to bad things happening to them or others. An apparent lack of formal education by the storytellers is important to note as you judge the credibility of the myths. The “Biddy Early” myth is captivating.

[Carolyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is an extremely long, repetitive snooze fest. Has helped me fall asleep many nights. There is great value in collecting folk stories, but some editing would have been beneficial. So many of tales are identical. Not just a few either. Like hundreds saying basically the same thing about the same person (Biddy Early). It was probably not necessary to publish every tale from every person.

[Todd Howell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work and a full volume of information, history of the tales and visions and much more.

Really liked this as it ties in well with other such things and was well written.

[Lee Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do love the stories in this book; they're the inspiration behind my own fiction. The length is the only drawback, to be honest. There are many stories that are similar to each other, so to read over 300 pages with several of the same stories told in only slightly different ways can become tedious. Still, I can't ignore the influence this folklore has on me- and the influence it had on Yeats!

[M F]

Well, it only took me two years to finish reading this...

Seriously. I started this in July 2015 and only just got around to finishing it. It's not really the kind of book you read all at once, but even bearing that in mind, that's a bit shameful on my part. I've set myself a challenge to try and deal with my ridiculous 'Currently Reading' shelf -- whether by finishing stuff, or by admitting that I'm never going to and removing them altogether.

Anyway, there's some interesting stuff in this, but it's not all brilliantly easy to understand. Stories are quoted as told to Lady Gregory by country people, which means they're sometimes phrased in a rather peculiar way.