Lady Gregory

Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 binding is sturdy cloth, and the gatherings are sewn, not guillotined and glued to the covers. In spite of a few caveats, the answer to the second question regarding justice being done to the subject must be a definite yes. It certainly fills what Mr. O'Brien calls a "demonstrated need" and for years to come should be the standard reference for anyone interested in the works and legend of T. E. Lawrence. Both the bibliographer and the publishers should be well satisfied with a job more than adequately done. Edwin Gilcher _______________________________Cherry Plain, New York_____________ LADY GREGORY Lady Gregory's Journals, Volume 2: Books Thirty to Forty-Four, 21 February 1925 - 9 May 1932. Daniel J. Murphy, ed. Afterword by Colin Smythe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. $79.00 Publication of this second volume of Isabella Augusta Gregory's Journals, the first was printed in 1978, completes an editorial project that for Daniel J. Murphy has been a labor of love. The Journals are now part of the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory's work inaugurated by the late T. R. Henn and carried on by Colin Smythe. Murphy's edition replaces the abridged version published in 1946 by Lennox Robinson. Working directly from the holograph notebooks and the typescript produced from them by Lady Gregory herself, all these materials now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, Murphy has been able to produce a text reliable enough for scholarly use. His notes are helpful but unobtrusive, and as a result, the woman writing the journal comes through in all her humanity. When Lady Gregory wrote the first entries in what became the first volume of her Journal, her chief motive seemed to be to keep a record of her involvement in the effort to get the National Gallery in London to honor the codicil to the will of her nephew Sir Hugh Lane leaving his collection of pictures to Dublin. The chief subject of this second volume is Lady Gregory's continued attempts to persuade the English government to effect the return of the Lane bequest and to convince the Irish government to construct a gallery in Dublin to display it. The journal also records her continued involvement in the management of the Abbey Theatre, her distress at the prospect of the sale of Coole Park, and her frustration at what she saw as the failure of her powers as a writer. In its totality, this second volume of Lady Gregory's Journals dramatizes her response to age and death in much the way the later poems of William Butler Yeats dramatize his. 245 Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 Yeats's account of Lady Gregory's final illness and death, never before published, forms a suitable conclusion to the Journals, detailing from an outsider's perspective events not handled directly in the entries . From the start of the project, Lady Gregory wrote with an eye on possible publication. She herself typed from the holograph notebooks a transcription complete except for the material in the last of them. At times her entries are cryptic, and she clearly recorded information to expand upon later. The entry for 15 January 1928 reads, in part, "Hardy dead. He had done his work well to the end." It mentions that she had cut his poem "Elgin Marble Room" from The Times the previous Christmas, and it ends with summary remarks about his work. "Of his novels, I liked best The Return of the Native, the moor the protagonist, influencing all; and I liked, though less, the Woodlanders. But the Dynasts is a great work, beyond them all" (229). It is an assessment, granting her taste for Hardy's attempt at the epic, not too far from our own, but her fondness for her Victorian predecessors comes as something of a surprise. It is a fondness apparently shared by Yeats, a figure so essentially modernist by current standards that the surprise is doubled. During the poet's long final stay at Coole Park, the visit during which he finished writing A Vision, her nightly reading to Yeats was from Anthony Trollope's The Way We...