Lady Gregory

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 surrender to an irresistible enticement and then entry into the forest depths (135). Kirkham's is a book in which useful abstractions like "metamorphic imagination" or the "idea of England" do not preclude sensitivity to particular subtleties of movement or a mulling over of the force of a particular word. The Imagination of Edward Thomas is a thorough and sensitive study of a fine poet. The book is not aimed at those who underestimate Thomas, nor is it designed to win over those who do not estimate him at all—Thomas is sufficiently well-known to make that popular critical posture unnecessary. The book is aimed, rather, at an audience for whom Thomas matters. And for such readers this will prove a valuable and stimulating volume. P. E. Mitchell Grant MacEwan Community College LADY GREGORY Ann Saddlemyer and Colin Smythe, eds. Lady Gregory Fifty Years After. Gerards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987. $37.50 IT HAS BECOME A FAMILIAR FEATURE of recent literary criticism for late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century authors, who after their death disappeared into obscurity, to be "resurrected," their work unearthed and revalued. The study of Lady Gregory's life and writings is no exception to this rule. Leaving aside any mention of the monumental Coole edition of her oeuvre, the edition before us is the last in a long line of monographs to appear since the early 1960s on—as G. B. Shaw described—"the greatest living Irishwoman." With a book like this, published within a mere two years of the appearance of Mary Lou Kohfeldt's exhaustive biography, who can doubt Lady Gregory's worth within the Irish literary revival? And yet one is not entirely convinced, and the apparent need to apologize in every newly published Gregory study (most explicitly in the title of Ann Saddlemyer's earlier study, In Defence of Lady Gregory, Playwright, 1966) as well as the contradictory views concerning the true value of her work only enhance this uneasiness. Saddlemyer and Smythe's approach to their subject differs from that of previous studies in the sense that theirs is an anthology of critical utterances and personal reminiscences hanging somewhere in between the aim and plan of the Critical Heritage Series and that of 509 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 any collection of up-to-date criticism: it is a mixture of past and present pronouncements on this definitely intriguing character. Still, notwithstanding the resulting heterogeneity, the variable length of the contributions, and the inevitable overlaps now and then, Lady Gregory Fifty Years After turns out to be an informative exploration of Lady Gregory's achievement. The focus shifts from a concentration on the life and loves of Lady Gregory to her work—the sonnets, her involvement with the Gaelic League, and the plays she wrote for the Abbey Theatre. Colin Smythe opens the volume with a chronology of Lady Gregory's life and the important commemorative events up to 1978. One notes the omission of Mary Lou Kohfeldt's valuable biography (mentioned elsewhere in this work) while Coxhead's earlier —admittedly pioneering but far less complete—biography is listed. Then follows a series of "fragments," short extracts of recollections by Lady Gregory's contemporaries which, together, compose a suggestive visual as well as mental picture of the person behind the name. Moreover, the fragments are glued together and completed by all of the subsequent essays, but more particularly by Andrew E. Malone's "Lady Gregory, 1852-1932," Mary Lou Kohfeldt Stevenson's "The Cloud of Witnesses," and Brian Jenkins's "The Marriage." In "A Woman's Sonnets," published here for the first time in the original version, James Pethica convincingly demonstrates how much W. S. Blunt's editorial emendations diminished the value of these "emotional " love poems. Pethica's probings into Lady Gregory's spiritual stirrings by means of these sonnets is, however, a hazardous enterprise as so much depends on conjecture. The analysis reminds one of the numerous hypotheses about Shakespeare's love life deduced from his sonnet cycle. Indeed, Lady Gregory's effusions might well pass for the "dark lady's" rejoinder to all...