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are stored, this work would not have been left to a woman of the house, that has to be minding the place, and listening to complaints and dividing her share of food.” She mentioned at the end of the dedication that the people of Kiltartan “have been very kind to me since I came over from Kilcriest, two-and-twenty years ago”. For a moment, Roxborough , with its English colonial sound, was being wiped off the map. The place she came from, in this final sentence , would have an Irish name.
    She would also create a past for herself, much as Yeats would do, a heritage that did not include rent-collecting and proselytizing Protestantism and three brothers who died from drink. In her dedication, she mentioned a figurewho would emerge as central in her version of her past. “I have told the whole story in plain and simple words,” she wrote, “in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child at Roxborough.” In her memoirs she would also invoke the spirit of Mary Sheridan, whom she claimed to have overheard talking to a beggar woman about their memory of the French arriving in Killala, Co. Mayo, sixty years earlier , in 1798.” And a child of the Big House”, she wrote, “keeps a clear memory of the old, old nurse in earnest talk on the doorstep with an old, old beggar, each remembering , through near a century, the landing of the French in that year to help the rebels.” Mary Sheridan, Lady Gregory wrote, had previously worked for Hamilton Rowan, one of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion.
    This invocation of an old, old past would leave out most of her ancestors but would include Lady Gregory’s great-grandfather William Persse, a member of the Volunteers who sought greater autonomy for Ireland in the 1780s. The Volunteer Bridge near Roxborough had a plaque in his memory: “This bridge was erected in 1789 by William Persse, Colonel of the Roxborough Volunteers in memory of Ireland’s Emancipation from Foreign Jurisdiction .” In re-creating herself, she moved from claiming a background that was connected to Irish rebellion to writing in support of rebellion itself. In the May 1900 editionof the Cornhill magazine, in an article called “Felons of Our Land”, she wrote about the ballads and poems of Irish rebellion with great naïveté, praising the literature of rebellion with the unrestrained approval of the recently converted . The fate of the Manchester martyrs, she wrote, “gave the touch of pathos that had been wanting to the Fenian movement”. She included some lines written by Blunt while in jail in Galway and inscribed on a book for her as an example of an old Irish ballad. In those years, as she re-made herself, anything could become part of the useful past.
    She was in Rome when the magazine came out. An old friend of her husband who read the article scolded her, as she put it, for “going so far from the opinions of my husband and son”. She wrote in her diary: “I had determined not to go so far towards political nationality in anything I write again, because I wish to keep out of politics and work only for literature; and partly because if Robert is Imperialist, I don’t want to separate myself from him.” The publication of her article did not prevent her and her son from being entertained at the British Embassy in Rome.
    It would be easy to suggest that Lady Gregory’s activities in these years are tinged with a sort of hypocrisy or blindness to the strangeness of her own position. But such shiftings and turnings and dichotomies and inconsistenciesare part of the history of Ireland in these years. The period between the fall of Parnell and the end of the Civil War saw a great vacuum in Ireland which many opposing forces sought to fill. None of these forces – from the unionists in the north to Patrick Pearse and his followers in the south to the trade