His influence was explicitly stated by the Abbey Theatre set with Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats and George William Russell attributing their interest in the Fenian Cycle of Gaelic tradition in part to him.
[1] Some of the figures associated with the political party Sinn Féin, including its founder Arthur Griffith, had positive things to say about his efforts in helping to retrieve from the past the Gaelic heroic outlook.
His father was the Reverend Thomas O'Grady, the scholarly Church of Ireland minister of Castletown Berehaven, County Cork, and his mother Susanna Doe (or Dowe).
Standish O'Grady's childhood home – the Glebe – lies a mile west of Castletownbere near a famine mass grave and ruined Roman Catholic chapel.
After an initial lukewarm response to his writing on the legendary past in "History of Ireland: Heroic Period" (1878–81) and "Early Bardic Literature of Ireland" (1879), he realised that the public wanted romance, and so followed the example of James Macpherson in recasting Irish legends in literary form, producing historical novels including "Finn and his Companions" (1891), "The Coming of Cuculain" (1894), "The Chain of Gold" (1895), "Ulrick the Ready" (1896) and "The Flight of the Eagle" (1897), and "The Departure of Dermot" (1913).
Being as much proud of his family's Unionism and Protestantism as of his Gaelic Irish ancestry – identities that were increasingly seen as antithetical in the late 1800s – he was described by Augusta, Lady Gregory as a "fenian unionist".