ISBN: 978-0-86140-188-8
21.6 x 13.8 cm.   241 pp.  1985

William Carleton epitomised the search by nineteenth century Irish writers for a national identity. He spoke in the voice of the Irish peasant and was heard all over the literary world. His books, from the early collection Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830) to the late novel Willy Reilly (1855), were tremendously popular, running into many editions in Ireland, England and America. He revised, retitled, and regrouped his works frequently, producing a rich yet confusing body of work, which is fully explored and identified in the first part of this work, the first complete bibliography to have been compiled of the works of William Carleton.

Carleton wrote for a wide range of magazines, from the ultra-Protestant Christian Examiner to the ultra-Catholic Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine. He often used his magazine stories as the basis for later publication in book form, frequently altering and adapting. Dr. Hayley lists Carleton’s contributions to periodicals in their chronological order, also indicating when and where they later appeared. She then devotes a section to criticism of Carleton’s work as it appeared in a surprisingly wide variety of journals and newspapers, from the earliest criticism in his own time up to the present day.

Carleton’s work has long awaited a bibliographer, and Dr. Hayley gives it the full, detailed and illuminating treatment it deserves. It is absolutely essential for everyone studying or collecting his works.

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ISBN: 978-0-84140-263-

21.0 x 14.8 cm    36 pp.    1986    Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures series (ISSN 0950-5121) volume 2

This second number in the series is in two sections. In his lecture given at the Library on 17 September 1986, Professor Clive Hart explores how Samuel Beckett modifies the fundamental structure of the outward and return journey by reducing it to obsessive repetitions getting nowhere. He begins by examining the large structural patterns of the plays to which he then relates the details of Beckett's language. Describing Beckett's characteristic, he analyses the stress on falling cadences, evocative of despair. He concludes his lecture by suggesting that, however depressing the content of the plays, they generate intense aesthetic delight.

In the second section Dr. George Sandulescu provides a synopsis of Beckett's output, detailing when each work was written, in what language, its translator, publisher and date of publication.

Volume1 ISBN: 0-86140-409-2 / 978-0-86140-409-4 £45.00
Volume2 ISBN: 0-86140-410-6 / 978-0-86140-410-0 £45.00
The Pair ISBN: 0-86140-411-4 / 978-0-86140-411-7 £90.00

21.6 x 13.8 cm.  vol. 1  xii, 1-438 pp.  vol. 2  x, 439-859 pp.           1998                       Princess Grace Irish Library series (ISSN 0269-2619)  11

The two volumes which form the eleventh publication in the Princess Grace Irish Library Series contain the proceedings of the Twelfth International James Joyce Symposium held in Monte Carlo in June 1990 under the auspices of the Princess Grace Irish Library and the patronage of H.S.H. Rainier III, Sovereign Prince of Monaco.

The first volume contains general and biographical essays and those dealing with theoretical and linguistic matters, sources, influences and comparative studies, while the second deals with the individual works - Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake - workshops and living book reviews, the major addresses, as well as papers on W.B.Yeats and Joyce and on Jack B.Yeats, details of the conference programme and the Index.

In all, there are contributions from some eighty scholars, covering every aspect of Joyce criticism, as well as the texts of speeches and talks by H.S.H. Princess Caroline of Monaco, Michael W.J. Smurfit, Stephen J. Joyce, and Anne Yeats.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      x, 203 pp.     1984       Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 18
.

The papers in this collection were given at the fifth triennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature held at University College, Dublin in July 1982.

The theme of the conference – the Irish writer and the city – is one that has not been extensively studied. Traditionally Irish writing has concerned itself with the countryside and the Big House, but as essays in this collection show, there was a hidden literature of the city, particularly in the drama, in the eighteenth and nine­teenth centuries, and in the nineteenth the city was a recurrent element in novels from Maria Edgeworth to George Moore. The incidence of urban settings increased in the twentieth century with Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Limerick emerging as challenging centres of literary concern. It is the complex issue of the relationships between the writers and the cities that these essays discuss. The movement of population from the countryside to the cities in the late nineteenth century led to some ambivalence on the part of writers who viewed the urban setting with a distaste that was partly determined by nostalgia for the rural hinterland. Social revolution complicated the problem by reducing the social density and creating a middle class that took some time to assert itself. Eventually ambivalence and dis­taste were replaced by acceptance or at least by the recognition that the city was home, the world they knew best and could best describe. These essays help us to understand how that confidence de­veloped and to see its thematic, technical and linguistic features. In the process they show that the subject of the Irish writer and the city is well worth examining.

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24.5 x 17.5 cm.    32 pp.   with 16 illus.   Third edition, with extra illus.  1995
(First published by Dolmen Press in 1965, 2nd edition 1977)

In 1917 the Norman Tower at Ballylee in the West of Ireland was adopted by W.B. Yeats as his home. But the tower was much more than his residence. It became his monument and symbol. Here he conceived and wrote some of his greatest poetry, and in his inscription to commemorate its restoration he pre­dicted the ruinous state into which the building lapsed after his death. The restoration of the Tower in the 1960s was inspired mainly by the enthusiasm of the Kiltartan Society and Mary Hanley. Liam Miller edited and extended Mrs Hanley’s text to set Yeats’s occupancy in a historical context. The illustrations include plans of the Tower, a map of the locality, photographs taken in the years when Yeats lived there, and some sketches by Lady Gregory.

The front cover illustration is of T. Sturge Moore’s design for the front cover and jacket of the first edition of The Tower (1928) as it appeared when blocked on the book.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      xii, 315 pp.  + 16 pp. with 19 illus.  1994   Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392) volume 5

Strangers to that Land, subtitled ‘British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine’, is a critical anthology of English, Scottish and Welsh colonists’ and travellers’ accounts of Ireland and the Irish from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

It consists exclusively of eyewitness descriptions of Ireland given by writers using the English language who had never been to Ireland before and were seeing the country for the first time. Each extract, where necessary, is set in context and briefly explained. The result is a vivid, continuous record of Ireland as defined and judged by the British over a period of four centuries.

In their general introduction the editors discuss the significance of these changing historical perceptions, as well as the impact upon them of literary conventions which played a part in shaping the emerging texts. It is argued that the relationship between Ireland and England within a British context constitutes a unique case study in the procedures of racial stereotyping and colonial representation, the exploration of cultural conflict and the aesthetics of travel writing.

There are twenty-one contemporary illustrations  in this, the fifth volume in the Ulster Editions and Monographs series.

Andrew Hadfield is lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Wales, and John McVeagh is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

With a Foreword by Benedict Kiely

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     170 pp.    2000     Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392) volume 8

At the peak of his career, Charles Lever (1806-1872) was one of the most successful novelists in the English language, and the only mid-nineteenth century Irish novelist to vie with Charles Dickens in popularity and earning potential. Yet, within three decades of his death, his works had sunk into uninterrupted obscurity. The light-heartedness of his earliest novels, The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1839) and Charles O’Malley - the Irish Dragoon (1841), brought condemnation from Nationalists who championed the serious and didactic purpose of literature in highlighting the desperate plight of Ireland’s indigenous population. It is in Lever’s positive and thoughtful reaction to these criticisms that his profound contribution to Irish literature in English is to be identified, most of all in his sensitive and ultimately pessimistic analysis of the role of the doomed Protestant ascendancy.

In this incisive critical study, Stephen Haddelsey charts the rise and fall of this gifted and much-maligned commentator on Irish affairs, and calls for a reappraisal of his position in the canon of Irish literature.

Using a selection from the thirty novels and five volumes of essays, he argues that Lever’s contribution is unique in its evolution from a Tory and non-separatist stance to the near-overt and despairing advocacy of Home Rule in his final and greatest novel, Lord Kilgobbin (1872).

STEPHEN HADDELSEY is a graduate of the University of Wales. Working as a freelance editor and writer, he has contributed to projects ranging from a study of European ethnology and cultural identity, to historical atlases of Ancient Greece and the American Civil War. He is currently working on a novel and is planning a comparative critical biography of the Victorian novelists, Charles Lever, George Whyte-Melville and Francis Smedley.

CONTENTS:
Foreword by Benedict Kiely
Introduction: Writing on the Margins
1: The Novels of Dr Quicksilver
2: A Year of Growth
3: An Iniquitous Act
4: The Double-Sided Coin
5: The Art of Brevity
6: Lever's Anti-Heroines
7: Last Efforts
Notes
Index

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

Edited and with a Foreword by Ann Saddlemyer

22.2 x 14.00  cm.  

This volume of Lady Gregory’s Collected Plays contains all those that deal with the magic of Irish folk stories or the supernatural aspects of ghosts or religion. Those which use as their plot magic and kings' sons were written for an audience of children. In The Dragon the theatrical monster is to come and carry off the princess as all good dragons should and then be killed by a prince, but in this case the disguised prince does not kill the beast but does a transplant giving him a squirrel's heart which makes him chase off to the West Indies in search of cocoa-nuts.

For her adult audiences, Lady Gregory wrote her Irish passion play, The Story Brought by Brigit, and Shanwalla, a play about the drugging of a prize racehorse just before a race. The innocence of the accused trainer is only proved after the appearance of the ghost of the trainer's murdered wife who sup­plies particularly relevant informa­tion which shakes the villain into a confession. The third act of this play was not as good as it might have been, and after Yeats had criticised it Lady Gregory rewrote the first part, published here for the first time. The original act, together with Yeats' criticisms, are included in an Appendix. The other plays in this volume are what Lady Gregory called her “first play”, Colman & Guaire; her beautiful miracle play set in the West of Ireland, The Travelling Man; The Full Moon; Aristotle's Bellows and Dave.

Volume I of the Collected Plays contains the Comedies; Volume II The Tragedies and Tragic-Comedies, and Volume IV the Translations, Adaptations and Collaborations. Each volume is edited and has a foreword by Professor Saddlemyer.

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General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

With an introduction by Elizabeth Coxhead

21.6 x 13.8 cm. ISBN: 978-0-901072-36-8   

Visions & Beliefs in the West of Ireland has been a classic among folklore collections since its first publication in 1920. Lady Gregory started collecting the stories from local people in Clare and West Galway in the 1890s, and in the early years was often accompanied on her trips by W.B.Yeats. Both found the tales a valuable source for their work. Originally intended as a joint project, the two volume collection (here published as a single book) finally appeared under Lady Gregory's name, but Yeats provided notes and two essays, `Witches and Wizards and Irish Folk-Lore' and `Swedenborg, Mediums & the Desolate Places', both of which appear here.

Many aspects of the supernatural are presented, and there are stories about seers, healers, charms, banshees, fairy forts, the evil eye – this is a treasure trove of west Irish folk-beliefs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Elizabeth Coxhead, who died in 1979, was a journalist, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She was also the author of Lady Gregory, A Literary Portrait (1961, revised 1966), the first book to be published exclusively about Lady Gregory, and Daughters of Erin (1965, republished 1979). which contains biographies of five leading women of the Irish Literary Revival period, Maude Gonne, Constance Markievicz, Sarah Purser, and Sally (Sarah) and Molly Allgood.

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General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

Edited and with a foreword by Ann Saddlemyer

22.2 x 14.0 cm.     
 

Although Lady Gregory's first plays were comedies, she preferred writing tragedies which she found easier. As Ann Saddlemyer writes in her foreword to this volume: "In the tragic form, with the character of comedy deliberately left out, one could celebrate strength where 'fate itself is the protagonist'. 'You may let your hero kick or struggle, but he is in the claws all the time.' "

Lady Gregory wrote five traged­ies, The Gaol Gate, Dervorgilla, Grania, McDonough's Wife and Kincora. Kincora gave her the most trouble in writing, perhaps because, as she herself thought ‘I kept too close to history’', and she had to ask Yeats and Synge for their help. It exists in two versions, the first of which appears in the Appendix of this volume.

This volume also contains the Tragic-Comedies, The White Cock­ade, The Canavans, The Image (which with The Gaol Gate was her favourite) and The Deliverer, the only bitter play Lady Gregory ever wrote.

Volume I of the Collected Plays contains the Comedies, Volume III, Wonder and the Supernatural, and Volume IV, Translations, Adapta­tions and Collaborations. Each volume is edited and has a fore­word by Professor Saddlemyer.

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Chosen and Introduced by Mary FitzGerald

The third volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-099-2 / 978-0-86140-99-7 £25.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-100-X / 978-0-86140-100-0 £9.99
21.6 x 13.8 cm. 379 pp. 1983

Contains: The Travelling Man, Spreading the News, Kincora, Hyacinth Halvey, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The Gaol Gate, The Rising of the Moon, Dervorgilla, The Workhouse Ward, Grania, The Golden Apple, The Story Brought by Brigit, Dave, Lady Gregory on playwriting and her plays, bibliographical checklist.

Lady Gregory wrote her first play when she was forty-nine years old. Apart from her collaborations with W. B. Yeats and others, and translated adaptations, she produced thirty-nine plays, while devoting a great deal of time to the management of the Abbey Theatre, and the Lane Pictures.

Described with admiration by Bernard Shaw as the Irish Molière, she contributed plays in every genre – comedies, tragedies, tragic-comedies, wonder and supernatural plays - and for every audience, most effectively in the one act form.

This collection of thirteen plays, and her writings about them, is intended to show the breadth of her playwriting abilities, and her thoughts on the plays and their creation. Chosen, with an introduction, by Mary FitzGerald, this third volume in the Irish Literary Studies series has a bibliographical checklist by Colin Smythe.

Mary FitzGerald gained her PhD from Princeton University for work on Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, and taught at Fordham University before taking up her appointment at the University of New Orleans. She was Review Editor of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T. R. Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

With a Foreword by T. R. Henn

ISBN: 978-0-900675-35-5

Studies and Translations from the Irish, including nine plays by Douglas Hyde

22.7 x 13.8 cm.  286 pp.    illus.  1974   Volume 11 of the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory's works

In Poets and Dreamers Lady Gregory has gathered together a number of essays and translations she had made from the Irish of Douglas Hyde, An Craoibhin Aoibhinn, ‘the Sweet Little Branch’, who was founder and President of the Gaelic League at the time and later to be the first President of the Republic of Ireland.

Lady Gregory has also written about other poets in this volume, notably Raftery, who was the model for Yeats’s Red Hanrahan, and also writes about West Irish ballads, and those by Jacobite and Boer and that beautiful poem by the expatriate Shemus Cartan, ‘A Sorrowful Lament for Ireland’.

Her other essays are covered by the Dreamers part of the title, ‘Mountain Theology’, ‘Herb Healing’ and ‘Workhouse Dreams’ among them. This edition contains a further five plays by Hyde, translated by Lady Gregory, three of which have not hitherto been published.

The Ap­pendices contain a number of early versions of poems and articles and includes ‘Dreams that have no moral’ by W. B. Yeats. This has been added from his Celtic Twilight (1902) as an Appendix in order to give an example as to how Lady Gregory worked together with him in providing him with material for his volumes. Lady Gregory refers to the story in ‘Workhouse Dreams’.

The Editors have also added a quant­ity of her revisions and an essay, ‘Cures by Charms’, which first appeared in the Westminster Budget with two of the other essays in this volume, but which was not included in the first edition.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

With a Foreword by Jon Stallworthy

ISBN: 978-0-900675-41-6

While the editing of Sir William Gregory's Autobiography was largely a matter of shortening the manuscript, Mr. Gregory's Letter-Box was a much greater editorial effort, for Lady Gregory had to create linking passages for the letters, filling in the social and historical background.

Mr. Gregory's experience in the post was unequalled: he held it for eighteen years and saw Viceroys and Chief Secretaries come and go. Not for nothing was he said to be the real ruler of Ireland. He served under five Viceroys – Lords Whitworth, Talbot, Wellesley, Anglesey, and Northumberland — and seven Chief Secretaries, the most important being Robert Peel (later Prime Minister), Charles Grant, Henry Goulburn and William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne, and Prime Minister).

Little more than a decade before Mr. Gregory's appointment, Ireland had lost its Parliament, and he had to carry out policies decided upon by a government who found it difficult to understand the Irish situation, and had no sympathy with the Roman Catholic majority of the population. Thus Mr. Gregory's term of office was dominated by the Napoleonic War, periodic disturbances, famines, the visit of King George IV, teaching his various superiors 'the ropes', and maintaining as smooth government as possible during the mounting campaign for Catholic Emancipation. The Letter-Box therefore supplies anyone interested in the period with a fascinating and valuable insight into an important epoch of Irish history.

Mr. Gregory's Letter-Box was first published in 1898 in a small edition which has been out of print for well over half a century. This volume has additional material intended for inclusion in a later edition which Lady Gregory kept in her copy of the book, as well as an extensive biographical index, doubling as notes for the text.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

Edited by Daniel J. Murphy, with an Afterword by Colin Smythe

ISBN: 978-0-900675-92-8

21.4 x 13.8 cm.      frontis.   t.e.g.

Lennox Robinson's selection from Lady Gregory's Journals was pub­lished in 1946. It only contained a small fraction of the total material that she typed out (editing as she did so) from her manuscript diaries. In 1964 the bulk of Lady Gregory's archives were bought by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and the typescripts of her diaries, which formed part of the archive, were prepared for publica­tion by the present editor, Daniel Murphy. The first volume of this edition, containing Books 1 to 29, was published in 1978. This second volume, contain­ing Books 30 to 44, not only completes the typed version of her diaries (which ended in November 1930), but also adds the unedited text of the manuscript diary she kept from then until a fortnight before her death.

It describes her continuing efforts to get the Lane Pictures returned to Ireland, the passing of Coole into the hands of the Irish Forestry Depart­ment, Abbey Theatre problems, the row over Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars and the break with him over its refusal of The Silver Tassie, Denis Johnston's connection with the Abbey as producer and playwright (with illu­minating insights into the Abbey's refusal of The Old Lady Says 'No!’), and other controversial matters.

Plagued by rheumatism and twice operated on for cancer, Lady Greg­ory was nevertheless determined not to give in to old age, and she relates the daily battle with her infirmities with objectivity.

Thus, with W. B. Yeats's account of her last hours, ‘The Death of Lady Gregory’, published here for the first time, the reader is given a far more complete picture of the last years of Lady Gregory's life than has hitherto been available.

Appended to this is an Afterword by Colin Smythe which describes the problems relating to the publication of the Journals and Autobiography following Lady Gregory’s death.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

Edited and with a Foreword by Daniel J. Murphy

ISBN: 978-0-900675-91-1

21.4. x 13.8 cm.   .  frontis, t.e.g.

Lennox Robinson's selection from Lady Gregory's Journals was first published in 1946 as the culmination of many years' nego­tiations between the Trustees of Lady Gregory's Estate and her London publishers, Putnam & Co., but it was only a fraction of the material that Lady Gregory had expected would be published when she sent the typescripts over to London in 1931.

Since the publication of that small selection (which appeared in the U.S.A. in 1947), no one saw the complete typescripts until they were purchased as part of the Lady Gregory archives by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 1964. After being cata­logued, they were made available to scholars. Now at last, Daniel Murphy's edition is available in two volumes, the first containing Books 1 to 29 and the second Books 30 to 44.

The Journals contain fascinating accounts of Lady Gregory's efforts to get back the Lane Pictures for Ireland, the Troubles, her activities at the Abbey Theatre, her life at Coole and her determination to keep it for her grandson Richard, as well as recording her friendship with W. B. Yeats, one of the most important and influential in English literature: thus the Journals are important for social and political as well as for artistic reasons, and are a prime source for all students of the literature and history of Ireland. They also provide a remarkable insight into the life and work of a woman whom Bernard Shaw called 'one of the most remarkable theatrical talents of our time' and 'the greatest living Irishwoman'.

Edited by James Pethica

ISBN: 978-0-86140-306-6

22.3 x 15.5 cm.    with 16 pp. with 36 illus.

These diaries, covering the decade or so following the death of her husband in 1892 until they peter out in 1902, chart the course of Lady Gregory's gradual but remarkable remaking of her life. Widowed at thirty-nine, with a London social circle composed mainly of her husband's friends, broadly Unionist in her political views, and with only a few minor publications to her name, she was by her fiftieth year an influential Nationalist, close friend of the major figures of the Irish literary movement, widely acknowledged as the hostess of a `workshop of genius' at Coole Park, and on the threshold of lasting literary prominence in her own right.

The rich account these pages give of Lady Gregory's life in the 1890s and of her deepening friendship with and patronage of W.B.Yeats radically changes the existing image of her evolution as an Irish writer and Nationalist. As the only contemporary diary kept by a major figure in the Irish literary movement during these years, their day-to-day record of the summer visits of Synge, George Moore, AE, Hyde and others to Coole, of the early years of the Irish Literary Theatre, and of the swiftly changing allegiances and tensions in her extensive literary circle, provides a revealing and frequently corrective counterweight to the narratives of these years written long afterwards (in the light of later autobiographical imperatives) by Yeats, Moore, Lady Gregory herself and others.

James Pethica was born in England and educated at Oxford, and is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia. He has published a number of articles on Yeats and Lady Gregory, and is at present completing a book on their literary partnership and creative collaborations. His edition of Yeats's Last Poems was published in the Cornell Yeats series in 1997.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

With a Foreword by Daniel Murphy

ISBN: 978-0-900675-85-0

21.6 x 13.8 cm

Here are the myths and legends of early Ireland as translated and written down by Lady Gregory, and published in 1902. This volume has a Preface by W.B. Yeats, who described it as `the best book that has ever come out of Ireland', and `the chief part of Ireland's gift of the imagination of the world'. Legends include: the Hound of Cuchulain and the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster.

Contents
Dedication of the Irish Edition to the People of Kiltartan
Foreword by Daniel Murphy
Preface. Signed W. B. Yeats, March 1902.
Birth of Cuchulain
Boy Deeds of Cuchulain
The Courting of Emer
Bricriu’s Feast, and the War of the Words of the Women of Ulster
The Championship of Ulster
The High King of Ireland
Fate of the Children of Usnach
The Dream of Angus
Cruachan
The Wedding of Maine Morgor
The War for the Bull of Cuailgne
The Awakening of Ulster
The Two Bulls
The Only Jealousy of Emer
Advice to a Prince
The Sons of Doel Dermai
Battle of Rosnaree
The Only Son of Aoife
Death of Cuchulain
Note by W. B. Yeats on The Conversation of Cuchulain and Emer. (Pages 32-34)

Notes. Signed A.G.

Illustrated by Joyce Dennys.
With a prefatory note by Maurice Collis

ISBN: 978-0-86140-010-2
19.0 x 13.5 cm.   128 pp.  1978 (reduced facsimile of first 1970 hardcover edition)

Lady Gregory was the cornerstone of the Irish Literary Revival in the first quarter of the century. At Coole Park in Co. Galway she was host to many literary figures and painters of the time: W. B. Yeats of course, J. M. Synge, Bernard Shaw, Douglas Hyde, A. E. (George W. Russell), Sean O'Casey, John Masefield, George Moore, and among the painters, J. B. Yeats the elder, Jack B. Yeats and Augustus John.

As well as spending a large part of her time as hostess of Coole, being a prolific author and playwright, a Director of the Abbey Theatre, the chief campaigner for the return of the Lane Pictures to Dublin, and an excellent landlord, she is remembered as a great personality.

This book is written by one of her grandchildren, Anne, who, with her brother and sister, was born and brought up at Coole, and in it she gives a new dimension to what we know of Lady Gregory and her guests.

As Maurice Collis writes in his Prefatory Note, ‘The narrative is Anne Gregory's recollection of what living at Coole with her grandmother was like. Her account is very cleverly constructed. The stature of Lady Gregory is subtly increased. She was a wonderful woman and a wonderful grandmother.’

'One of the most delightful books I have ever read ... a truly lovable book.' Gabriel Fallon in The Evening Press

'A charming book and Joyce Dennys's pictures are a delight.’ The Spectator

‘a MUST for children of ALL ages.' Sunday Independent

‘The book shows us the great through a child's eyes, skilfully, wittily, and sometimes surprisingly.' British Book News

Edited by Jerusha Hull McCormack

Publication of Ian Fletcher’s The Poems of John Gray (1988) was welcomed by reviewers in the U.S. and England. Now ELT Press offers a companion vol­ume, The Selected Prose of John Gray.

It complements the poetry by printing essays and short stories chosen from different periods of Gray's life – some selections previously unpublished, others having appeared only in limited periodical circulation.

This new book adds to our understanding of Gray and topics relevant to the era. Professor McCormack explains the importance of the prose in her introduction: ‘Gray has a significance for his time as a writer who has made the transition from the mannered decadence of “The Modem Actor" to the cryptic pre-modernist narrative of Park (1932). As such, his work helps us recon­struct our own past: in particular, it requires us to acknowledge that abyss which lies between the late Victorian and the years after the Great War. As one who survived, not only personally but as a writer, Gray allows us to speculate on the strategies by which he sought to bridge that chasm. And in so doing, John Gray's work may provide an example of how, on the edge of greater chasms, we may still presume to tell stories and to feel, in telling them, that they are permitted to tell us something about our experience – and ourselves.’

Professor McCormack traces the development of Gray’s life and writings in her introductory essay. She prefaces each selection with a useful headnote. Her extensive notes to the prose clarify topical allusions and make Gray’s work accessible to a wide audience.

Jerusha Hull McCormack, University College Dublin, is author of John Gray: Poet, Dandy, and Priest (University Press of New England, 1991).

Design: The book is typeset in Joanna, the stunning typeface Eric Gill designed especially for the Sheed & Ward 1932 edition of Park. Nineteen illustrations are reproduced from original printings of Gray’s writings. ELT Press’s David Schwartz has designed 14 beautifully hand-drawn initial letters for the prose. (For details on the illustrations and typography, see pages ix—x, page 316).

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Collected, edited and annotated by A. Norman Jeffares

23.5 x 15.5 cm.     xxxii, 861 pp.  2001
ISBN: 978-0-86140-404-9

Poems and Plays brings together the contents of Oliver St John Gogarty’s fifteen volumes of poetry, including his Collected Poems. It also contains poems published individually in various journals and 232 hitherto unpublished poems; as well, there are his three Abbey plays – Blight, A Serious Thing and The Enchanted Trousers – published under the nom-de-plume Gideon Ouseley, together with Incurables and the incomplete Wavelengths.

Much of Gogarty’s poetry was classically inspired; his witty lyric poems have the elegant grace of Herrick or the terse eloquence of Marvell. His appreciative poems about his friends and his elegies for some of them are balanced by Martial-like satires; his enthusiastic enjoyment of beauty is matched by the encomiastic treatment of places, itself reinforced by a keen awareness of their historical and often dramatic associations.

Gogarty, the son and grandson of doctors, was born in Dublin in 1878. His novel, Tumbling in the Hay (1939; 1996) gives a sparkling account of medical student life in Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. When he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, Gogarty was befriended by the famous classical dons Tyrrell and Mahaffy and the philosopher Macran. At the same time he had a circle of contemporaries (many met earlier when he was briefly a student at University College, Dublin) known for their raffish behaviour and mocking, bawdy wit; among them were James Joyce, John (‘Citizen’) Elwood and Vincent Cosgrave. James Starkey (‘Seumas O’Sullivan’) was another contemporary companion. And Gogarty’s acquaintanceship widened to include George Moore and W.B.Yeats who, despite thirteen years difference in age, became a lifelong friend.

An all-round athlete who was a champion cyclist, who successfully rescued drowning men on three occasions, Gogarty followed up his medical degree with a spell of study in Vienna, returning to become a successful Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist in Dublin. His lively autobiographical As I was going down Sackville Street (1937; 1994) records something of the entertaining eccentricity of many of the city’s citizens in the 1920s as well as the characters of those involved in its cultural and political life.

Gogarty’s wit irradiated his exuberant conversation. Many of his Rabelaisian poems have remained unpublished until now. They circulated freely, however, in the talk of Dublin, especially among the group who met in Fanning’s public house or the Bailey, such fellow wits as George Redding and Neil Montgomery.

Gogarty, whose politically active friends included Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and Michael Cusack, became a Senator of the Irish Free State. Kidnapped by the I.R.A. in the Irish Civil War in 1923, he escaped being shot by plunging into the River Liffey and swimming downstream to safety. Renvyle, his large house in Connemara, bought when he realised that cars made it more accessible from Dublin (he was an enthusiastic early motorist and Ireland’s first amateur aviator) was burnt down by the I.R.A. shortly afterwards. When it was rebuilt in 1930 Gogarty turned it into a hotel. There, as in Dublin, he and his wife entertained generously, their circle of friends ever-widening.

As he moved away from medicine Gogarty sold his Dublin house, 15 Ely Place, finding more time for writing in Connemara. In 1939 he went on a lecture tour in the United States and, disillusioned by de Valera’s Ireland, stayed on, supporting himself and his family (there were two sons and a daughter) in Ireland, by writing and lecturing. He came back at intervals, transport permitting, but died in New York in 1957, the year that he had decided to return permanently to Ireland.

Now that his work is being made available again, readers have the opportunity to appreciate the lively evocative writings of this Renaissance man whose poetry W.B.Yeats so admired, including more of Gogarty’s work in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 than of any other living poet. His poetry conveys his infective love of beauty of all kinds, the fundamental seriousness beneath his witty persiflage, his moving awareness of Time’s inexorable pressures, and his emphasis upon the need to face death with dignity.

The collection is divided under the headings chosen by Gogarty himself for Collected Poems

Part 1 - Collected Poems (1951): Odes and Addresses - Earth and Sea - Satires and Facetiae - Love and Beauty -Life and Death - Elegies.

Part 2: Poems in Various Volumes - published and unpublished, not included in Collected Poems. Hyperthuleana (1916), Secret Springs of Dublin Song (1918), The Ship and Other Poems (1918), An Offering of Swans (1923), An Offering of Swans and Other Poems (1924), Wild Apples (1928, 1929, 1930), Selected Poems (1933), Others to Adorn (1938), Elbow Room (1939), Perennial (1944, 1946), Unselected Poems (1954), Penultimate Poems (prepared but unpublished).

Part 3: Poems published in journals and unpublished volumes. Odes and Addresses - Earth and Sea - Satires and Facetiae (Dislikes and Disapprobations, Limericks, Parodies, Light-hearted Verses, Some Martello Tower Poems, Seamus O’Sullivan Poems, Poems concerning Dermot Freyer, Jesting about the Sinclair Brothers, Classical Themes, Religious Thoughts, Political Poems, On Drinking, Medical Meditations, Monto Poems) - Love and Beauty -Life and Death - Elegies.

Appendices, Notes, Notes on the texts, and Addenda, including ‘Delphi’, written as an entry for the Newdigate Prize.