This first volume of Lady Gregory's Shorter Writings covers the years 1882-1900. Edited and introduced by James Pethica, it makes available all the previously uncollected work she wrote for publication during the period, including newly-discovered articles, material that was never printed, and items that appeared anonymously or pseudonymously. The volume begins with her first independent publication, Arabi and His Household (1882), written in support of the deposed leader of the Egyptian Nationalist rebellion, who faced likely execution by the British. Gregory's travel journalism and other occasional writings of the 1880s were sufficient to catch the attention of Oscar Wilde, who praised her "clever pen" and invited her to contribute to The Woman's World, the periodical he edited. Also included here are more than a dozen unpublished poems, often highly personal, written during her travels to India and Ceylon, along with the sequence of twelve sonnets she gave Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in 1883 as they ended their clandestine affair. Writings from the early 1890s include one short story set in Italy, and another with a plot her friend Henry James briefly considered using as the basis for a novel. Gregory's publications from the mid-1890s offer sharp new insight into her growing interest in Irish folklore, her emergence as an Irish nationalist, and her enthusiasm for the Irish language and the Gaelic League. Key works include a previously unpublished pamphlet on the inequities of Irish taxation, and Gregory's first substantial folklore essays. The last writings in the volume register her increasing centrality in the emergence of the Irish Literary Theatre, her developing friendship and collaborations with W.B.Yeats, and her growing confidence in her creative voice as she began her rise to prominence.

The four short works collected in this book were among the earliest plays to be authored collaboratively by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Written in the pivotal years during which the "Irish Literary Theatre" experiment of 1899 1901 began to evolve into what would become the Abbey Theatre, they show both writers engaging with questions central to the early Irish dramatic movement: How should "Irishness" be represented on the stage? To what extent should artists engage directly with Nationalist politics? And what role might literature play in the creation of a new Ireland?

The manuscripts presented here chart the evolution of two plays published over Yeats's name: "Cathleen ni Houlihan" the pair's most successful collaboration, and the work that confirmed Yeats's credentials as a Nationalist writer and the "peasant" farce "The Pot of Broth." This book also includes manuscript material for "The Country of the Young" and "Heads or Harps," which the writers left unpublished and unproduced during their lifetimes."