This collection brings together Jo Rippier’s writings about fishing, fact and fiction, and in one case ‘dramatic’. He has recorded memorable experiences that occurred during his life in his pursuit of fish, and meeting unusual personalities, such as Mr Justice T. C. Kingsmill Moore (‘Saracen’), and Hugh Falkus, as well letting his imagination provide a number of fictional tales. Together they provide the reader with a variety of enjoyable stories and articles, and some historical illustrations, mostly from Punch, ideal for fishermen with time on their hands.

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

Edited and Introduced by James Pethica

23.4 x 15.5 cm. x, 248 pp. + 32 illus.

This sixteenth volume of the Coole Edition contains Lady Gregory’s first writings on Ireland. They include the two surviving versions of her unpublished first attempt at autobiography, 'An Emigrant's Note Book' (1883); three short stories she wrote under the pseudonym ‘Angus Grey’ —'A Philanthropist', 'A Gentleman' and 'Peeler Astore' (1890-91); and her anonymously-issued anti-Home Rule pamphlet A Phantom's Pilgrimage, or Home Ruin (1893). Appendices contain her lyric 'Alas, a woman may not love' (1886) and the poems she sent to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt following his imprisonment in Galway in 1888 for participating in a banned tenant protest against evictions. Also included is the newly-rediscovered text of Sir William Gregory’s prescient 1881 pamphlet on the Land League.

James Pethica’s Introduction sets these works within their biographical, political and creative contexts, charting the imperatives and aspirations driving Lady Gregory’s first sustained efforts as a writer. This remarkable collection throws an entirely new light on the years of her marriage and early widowhood, revealing the foundational influence of Sir William Gregory on her political views and self-conception as a landowner, and detailing the course of her turn to Irish themes and to the life of the Galway world she had grown up in for subject matter. Lady Gregory's Early Irish Writings shows her already finding core elements of her creative voice long before she met W.B. Yeats and emerged to later prominence as a folklore collector, dramatist, and cultural nationalist.

James Pethica teaches Irish Studies, Modern literature, and drama at Williams College in Massachussetts. He is preparing the authorized biography of Lady Gregory for Oxford University Press.

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

Edited and Introduced by James Pethica

23.4 x 15.5 cm. x, 298 pp.

This first volume of Lady Gregory’s Shorter Writings covers the years 1882-1900.  Edited and introduced by James Pethica, whose authorized biography of Gregory is in preparation for Oxford University Press, it makes available all the previously uncollected work she wrote for publication during the period, including newly-discovered articles, material that was never printed, and items that appeared anonymously or pseudonymously. 

    The volume begins with her first independent publication, Arabi and His Household (1882), written in support of the deposed leader of the Egyptian Nationalist rebellion, who faced likely execution by the British.  Gregory's travel journalism and other occasional writings of the 1880s were sufficient to catch the attention of Oscar Wilde, who praised her "clever pen" and invited her to contribute to The Woman’s World, the periodical he edited.   Also included here are more than a dozen unpublished poems, often highly personal, written during her travels to India and Ceylon, along with the sequence of twelve sonnets she gave Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in 1883 as they ended their clandestine affair.  Writings from the early 1890s include one short story set in Italy, and another with a plot her friend Henry James briefly considered using as the basis for a novel. 

   Gregory’s publications from the mid-1890s offer sharp new insight into her growing interest in Irish folklore, her emergence as an Irish nationalist, and her enthusiasm for the Irish language and the Gaelic League.  Key works include a previously unpublished pamphlet on the inequities of Irish taxation, and Gregory’s first substantial folklore essays.  The last writings in the volume register her increasing centrality in the emergence of the Irish Literary Theatre, her developing friendship and collaborations with W.B.Yeats, and her growing confidence in her creative voice as she began her rise to prominence. 

James Pethica teaches Irish Studies, Modern literature, and drama at Williams College in Massachusetts. He is preparing the authorized biography of Lady Gregory for Oxford University Press.