The Lady Gregory-Yeats Collection at Emory University

Abstract

When the general editor of Yeats’s letters, John Kelly, visited the young collection of books, manuscripts, and letters by W. B. Yeats in the Robert W. Woodruff Library for Advanced Studies at Emory University in 1981, he remarked with astonishment that “If anyone had told me in 1979 that they were starting out to build a major Yeats collection, I would have said it was impossible.” Yet in that year the library vigorously began the mission by acquiring the personal collection of Richard Ellmann (who is now Woodruff Professor of English at Emory) and much of Lady Gregory’s personal collection of books and manuscripts presented to her by Yeats.1 The subsequent acquisition of scores of first and variant editions, manuscripts, letters, photographs, and other research documents has made the new collection a unique complement to collections at the National Library of Ireland, Stony Brook, the Berg, Texas, Kansas, Indiana and elsewhere. As the late F. S. L. Lyons, Yeats’s biographer, wrote after his examination of the collection in February 1983, “It seems to me to be beyond question that recent gifts and purchases have brought the collections in this library into the front rank of major American sources for the study of Anglo-Irish literature, and this is true equally of quantity and of quality.”