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he joined her and Yeats and Douglas Hyde and others at Coole, being astounded not only by the lush surroundings but also by the seriousness and intensity and talent of his fellow house guests. “These were wonderful nights,” he wrote, “long nights filled with good talk.” He corresponded with the Yeats family and Lady Gregory over many years, offering assistance both moral and practical. When Yeats’s father moved to New York in December 1907, complete with his considerable wit and indolence, and then refused to come home – he died there in 1922 – he was bankrolled and cared for by John Quinn. The old man said that Quinn was “the nearest approach to an angel in my experience”.

    As soon as she arrived in the United States, Lady Gregory was treated as a celebrity. Her being a “Lady” made her interesting to start with, but she was a lady with a controversial Irish play in tow. Journalists followed her everywhere she went, copiously misquoting her. (“When I say pig, it comes out sausage,” she wrote to Robert.) The hostesses of the day lionized her. (“Mrs Jack Gardner, who is the leader of fashion [in Boston], and has a large collection of pictures, came and seized my hands and said ‘you are a darling, a darling, a darling’.”)
    Boston was easy, despite some protests and complaints; so too Providence, where the Police Commissioners “found nothing to object to in the play but enjoyed every minute of it”. She didn’t think much of Washington. (She wrote to Yeats: “There doesn’t seem to be much population , except members of government and niggers.”) In Washington she was invited to the White House and met President Taft. (“When I was standing near him talking, something soft and pillowy touched me, it was his tummy which is the size of Sancho Panza’s.”)
    Lady Gregory had taken no part in the public debate about The Playboy at the Abbey; unlike Yeats, she had no experience of speaking in public. Now, since there was huge demand for her to speak, she began to give lectures, and this newly discovered facility was another aspect of the great novelty of America. In November, as she arrived in New York and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, the priests began to preach against The Playboy. When the disturbances in the theatre began, as Quinn had warned her they would, she went backstage and “knelt in the opening of thehearth, calling to every actor who came within earshot that they must not stop for a moment”. It amused her that the protesters threw both rosaries and stinkpots.
    Former president Teddy Roosevelt, who had admired her Cuchulain translation, sat in the same box in the theatre as Lady Gregory and spoke afterwards about his admiration for the play. “When we got to the theatre,” she wrote, “and into the box, people saw Roosevelt and began to clap and at last he had to get up, and he took my hand and dragged me on my feet too and there was renewed clapping.”
    Lady Gregory spent day and night being fêted and interviewed; the rest of the time she wrote letters home. She kept copies of these letters and used them as the basis for a chapter of her book Our Irish Theatre , which appeared in 1913, but the chapter lacks the astonishing vitality of the letters, especially those to her son Robert. Her indignation and malice and indiscretion are matched by sheer delight at her adventures and an eye for absurdity and detail and a sense of wonder that this was happening to her. “I have nice rooms now,” she wrote to him, “on the ninth floor, there are twenty-two floors altogether, the place riddled with telephones and radiators etc and I was glad to hear the voice of a fat housemaid from Mayo a while ago. It is a strange fate that sends me into battle after my peaceable life for so many years and especially over Playboy that I havenever really loved, but one has to carry