Lady Gregory, John Quinn, and Joyce

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)

Letter to John Quinn

Coole Park, May 20, 1917

John Quinn’s review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Vanity Fair (May 1917) declared Joyce “a star of the first magnitude” in Irish letters. Thanking Quinn for sending her a copy, Gregory briefly remembers the efforts she had made to help Joyce in 1902–4, “tho’ he was difficult to help,” and anticipates that Quinn’s review will help Joyce “very much—and he deserves it. The ‘Portrait’ is a fine book, a discovery in autobiography. . . all that is useless and so cumbersome left out.” She particularly commends Joyce’s “virile work” for helping “chase away the sort of shadowy twilight that is the fringe of the ‘Celtic Movement’ and that makes Yeats hate his own ‘Land of Hearts Desire.’”