Isabella Augusta Gregory (1852-1932), born a Persse at Roxborough, County Galway, married Sir William Gregory of Coole Park in 1880 and was widowed in 1892. She learned Irish, collected folklore among the people of Kiltartan near Coole, and with W. B. Yeats and Edward Martyn launched the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, which led to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (1904), where she was a director and a prolific playwright. Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) was followed by a companion volume of Irish myth, Gods and Fighting Men (1904).
Frequently Cited
“the stories which it tells are a chief part of Ireland's gift to the imagination of the world — and it tells them perfectly for the first time.”
“if there is a whelp of the same breed to be had in Ireland, I will rear him and train him until he is as good a hound as the one killed; and until that time, Culain," he said, "I myself will be your watch-dog, to guard your goods and your cattle and your house.”
“It is little I would care," said Cuchulain, "if my life were to last one day and one night only, so long as my name and the story of what I had done would live after me.”
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.