REVIEW: Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin

TITLE:  Lady Gregory's Toothbrush
AUTHOR: Colm Tóibín
PUBLISHER:      Picador.  (Nov. 2003)
ISBN:   0 330 41993            PRICE: A$ 22.00 (paperback)      125 pages

Reviewed by Ann Skea ([EMAIL PROTECTED])

"The greatest living Irishwoman", said George Bernard Shaw of Lady Augusta 
Gregory after she had fought the bans and directed his play The Shewing-up of 
Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama at the Abbey Theatre. Shaw's play, 
like Synge's Playboy of the Western World, was "deeply objectionable" to some 
but was also a huge success at the box-office. And it was another success for 
Augusta Gregory and W.B. Yeats  in their fight against the censorship of Irish 
drama, and in their efforts to encourage Irish writing and establish Irish 
literature as a valuable part of the Irish culture.

The paradox of this was that at a time when militant Irish Nationalists were 
attacking the landowning gentry, Lady Gregory was both a nationalist (in her 
passionate love of Ireland and her literary work) and a landowner who spent a 
great deal of her time in England.

Colm Tóibín's biographical essay (which is based on letters and other writing 
of Lady Augusta Gregory held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public 
Library) shows how Augusta Gregory juggled these two roles. It shows, too, what 
a determined, intelligent, generous and imaginative person she was.

As the youngest, least attractive and accomplished daughter of a strict, 
Protestant family, she had not been expected to marry. But at the age of 
twenty-seven, she accepted the proposal of Sir William Gregory, a widower, 
thirty-five years older than herself, who had been a parliamentarian and 
Governor of Ceylon and who was, at the time of their marriage, a trustee of the 
National Gallery in London. Coole Park was Sir William's Irish estate, but the 
Gregories spent only the summers there. It did, however, become the focus of 
Augusta's literary life and work.

>From her writings, Colm Tóibín documents her collecting of Irish folk-tales, 
her growing confidence in her writing, her reinventing of herself through her 
love for Ireland, and the influence of her friendships with, in particular, 
William Scawen Blunt (who was her lover), John Quinn (an American who was also 
her "secret passion"), and William Butler Yeats. Her ambivalent feelings about 
some of the battles she and Yeats fought as founders and fellow directors of 
the Abbey Theatre also make interesting reading.

This is a slim book but it offers an interesting and enjoyable picture of a 
remarkable woman and the important part she played in the revival of Irish 
literature.

And the toothbrush? Well, I'll let you discover that for yourself, but is was 
part of the paradoxical role Augusta Gregory played in creating a literary 
heritage for all, including those "cavity-riddled" Irish who most opposed her.

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