'Wage for Each People Her Hand Has Destroyed': Lady Gregory's Colonial Nationalism (Critical Essay‪)‬

The title of this essay is taken from one of the 'Boer Ballads' that Lady Gregory first collected in 1901 and then included in Poets and Dreamers (1903). The ballad insisted that England was a queen who would lose her crown as: Unlike the other songs she printed, which were collected in English and simply treated the Boers' situation as an allegory of the Irish cause, this ballad was translated by Gregory from the Irish and was truly trans-colonial. That she laid more emphasis on it than on any other (choosing it to end her article) was no accident. The paradoxical phrase 'colonial nationalism' used in my title is meant to imply the complex personal and political history that lay behind this emphasis and this choice.