The Irish dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) is best known for her collaboration with Yeats and Synge in the formation of the Irish National Theatre and the Abbey Theatre Company.

Isabella Augusta Persse was born on March 15, 1852, to Dudley Persse and his second wife, Frances Barry, near Gort, County Galway, in the west of Ireland, where Gaelic is still the language spoken by the people. In 1881 she married Sir William Gregory of Coole Park (an estate near Gort), member of Parliament, former governor of Ceylon, and a friend of the English novelist Anthony Trollope. Their only son, the artist Robert Gregory, was shot down over Italy in World War I; he was memorialized in several poems by William Butler Yeats ("An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," among others).

After her husband's death in 1892, Gregory began collecting legends and history concerning the west of Ireland; these she translated into...