Her mother, Frances Barry, was related to Viscount Guillamore, and her family home, Roxborough, was a 6,000-acre (24 km2) estate located between Gort and Loughrea, the main house of which was later burnt down during the Irish Civil War.

[3] She was educated at home, and her future career was strongly influenced by the family nurse (i.e. nanny), Mary Sheridan, a Catholic and a native Irish speaker, who introduced the young Augusta to the history and legends of the local area.

[4] She married Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower with an estate at Coole Park, near Gort, on 4 March 1880 in St. Matthais' Church, Dublin.

[5] Sir William, who was 36 years her elder, had just retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), having previously served several terms as Member of Parliament for County Galway.

He also had a house in London, where the couple spent a considerable amount of time, holding weekly salons frequented by many leading literary and artistic figures of the day, including Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, John Everett Millais and Henry James.

He was killed during the First World War while serving as a pilot, an event which inspired W. B. Yeats's poems "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" and "Shepherd and Goatherd".

While in Egypt Lady Gregory met, and in 1882 and 1883 had an affair with, the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, during which she wrote a series of love poems, A Woman's Sonnets.

[11] The unsigned pamphlet features Egyptian gods sitting in judgment upon Gladstone, and his phantom being shown the results of high taxes and the English government.

As James Pethica writes, "With its uncompromising portrayal of a country sliding into anarchy and ruin, the anonymous pamphlet drew appreciative comment from those of Gregory's London friends who knew it to be her work.

"[13] During the winter of 1883, whilst her husband was in Ceylon, she worked on a series of memoirs of her childhood home, with a view to publishing them under the title An Emigrant's Notebook,[14] but this plan was abandoned.

[17] She was to write later, "If I had not married I should not have learned the quick enrichment of sentences that one gets in conversation; had I not been widowed I should not have found the detachment of mind, the leisure for observation necessary to give insight into character, to express and interpret it.

In 1904, Lady Gregory, Martyn, Yeats, John Millington Synge, Æ, Annie Horniman and William and Frank Fay came together to form the Irish National Theatre Society.

[29] At the opening of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in January 1907, a significant portion of the crowd rioted, causing the remainder of the performances to be acted out in dumbshow.

In 1932, Lady Gregory, whom Shaw once described as "the greatest living Irishwoman",[40] died at home aged 80 from breast cancer,[17] and is buried in Bohermore Cemetery, Galway.

[42] Many of the diaries and journals she kept for most of her adult life have been published, providing a rich source of information on Irish literary history during the first three decades of the 20th century.

[43] Her Cuchulain of Muirthemne is still considered a good retelling of the Ulster Cycle tales such as Deidre, Cuchulainn, and the Táin Bó Cúailnge stories.

Thomas Kinsella wrote "I emerged with the conviction that Lady Gregory's Cuchul-ian of Muirthemne, though only a paraphrase, gave the best idea of the Ulster stories".

[44] However her version omitted some elements of the tale, usually assumed to avoid offending Victorian sensibilities, as well being an attempt as presenting a "respectable" nation myth for the Irish, though her paraphrase is not considered dishonest.

[45] Other critics find the bowdlerisations in her works more offensive, not only the removal of references to sex and bodily functions, but also the loss of Cuchulain's "battle frenzy" (Ríastrad); in other areas she censored less than some of her male contemporaries, such as Standish O'Grady.