Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (review)

In 2000, Colm Toíbín became a Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, which allowed him to work in the Lady Gregory papers held there. The initial result of this research was the publication of an article called "Lady Gregory's Toothbrush" which appeared in the New York Review of Books in August, 2001. The full-length book form of that article was then published by Lilliput Press of Dublin, in March, 2002, to mark the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Lady Gregory's birth.

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush is a biographical essay, rather than a biography. The essay is, then, all the more remarkable as it manages not only to contain, but also to go a long way toward explicating the character of Lady Gregory in a mere 127 pages. Toíbín's style as a novelist makes this essay a highly enjoyable, readable account of the founding mother of the Irish Literary Revival and of the world's first national theater, the Abbey. There are incisive observations —as well as sharp criticism—of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy into which Augusta Persse was born and married. However, Toíbín resists the urge to tell all in this all-too-brief biographical sketch, and instead is content to hint at or allude to other events and characters that walked in the background of the matronly shadow at Coole Park, County Galway. The essay, then, is more of a brief introduction to the life of this woman who has for some reason been too often undervalued in many of the critical narratives of this formative period in Irish literary history.

The axis upon which the book turns is the transformation of the young pro-Unionist Augusta Persse from Roxborough Estate into the republican Lady Gregory. We are given insights and stories as to how this change took place, but it must be admitted that the author never fully tells us why; the motives behind Gregory's sociopolitical transformation are never overtly stated. Toíbín's style serves to open gaps in the narrative of her life rather than trying to answer every question in the definitive manner of biographers. This is the one outstanding question in a book that opens up many others and surely paves the way for a full-length biography of one of the most powerful and influential matriarchs of Irish literary history.

Lady Gregory's life was surrounded by ambiguities and, more interestingly, deep contradictions. Toíbín recounts such telling incidents as Gregory, upon taking care of the estate for her son after her husband's death, collecting both folk stories and rents at the same time, or of how a tea-party at the workhouse was followed by a dance at Coole Park. Her husband, Sir William Gregory, is famous for the "Gregory Clause," an amendment to the 1847 Poor Law Act that instituted a change whereby tenants of half an acre or more were not entitled to Poor Law relief. In effect, this clause transformed the Irish landscape during and after the famine years, as it was the change that "removed" the small holders and cottiers from the land. Toíbín writes that, "His famous clause helped to undermine the very class that Yeats and Lady Gregory later sought to exalt." Yeats's relationship with Lady Gregory contained its share of ambiguities as well; it apparently took Yeats some time to acknowledge the literary quality of Lady Gregory's writing, and this along with the question of the authorship of Cathleen Ni Houlihan—the majority of which was written by Lady Gregory—gave rise to some conflict in their relationship. Her work for the establishment of a national theater and for the literary use of "Kiltartanese" as a local dialect had both admirers and critics. She wrote and supported works concerned with the social injustices...