Yeats's roofless castle

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)

Letter to John Quinn

Coole Park, August 11, 1917

In this letter to Quinn, Gregory voices some of her resentment and disapproval of Yeats’s romantic and hieratic pretentions in buying a “roofless castle”: “I never encouraged him . . . and would have actually opposed it but that it seemed ungracious.” She also pragmatically anticipates the expenses, limitations, and frustrations Yeats would indeed encounter: “There will be mason and architect . . . painting and woodwork and furnishing. And then, it is too damp a place for him to spend more than a few summer months in; and it must be kept aired and watched in winter [H]e has had little experience of all this.”