O’Casey found solace in the home of the founder and patron, as well as the most prolific and popular playwright, of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory. It might not have been expected that, during the 1920s, the owner of the grand estate of Coole Park would befriend a manual labourer who worked on the Dublin railways. But in that decade Lady Gregory and O’Casey became close acquaintances, and she proved to be one of the figures who most encouraged and developed his playwriting. This chapter examines the mentoring and friendship that Gregory provided to O’Casey, and emphasises her wider influence upon him, which has tended to be underplayed in the years after her death.

O’Casey is both the Abbey’s most-produced playwright and also an Abbey writer who in a period of a decade or so submitted eleven plays, more than half of which were initially rejected. In O’Casey’s own often tetchy account of this relationship, the rejections are deplorable failures to recognise his genius, and some version of that view has been adopted by much O’Casey scholarship over the years. However, this chapter acknowledges the other side of this story, looking at the extent to which the Abbey in the 1920s functioned as a repertory theatre, part of whose institutional mission involved the mentoring and development of emerging writers.

Chapter 5 considers the implications of modernist efforts to rethink notions of gender and creative autonomy for our understanding of genius. Although some writers and artists imagined androgyny as something a man and woman could achieve together, the same does not appear to have been true of genius, which remains for the modernists a phenomenon exhibited or embodied by individuals. I contend that the modernists’ own practice of cross-sex collaboration challenges this conception, as evidenced by two examples: the play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the novel Under the Volcano, written by Malcolm Lowry with significant input from his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry. Neither of these masterpieces could have been realized by just one of its coauthors alone, yet no member of either couple thought of that couple itself as “a genius.” This limitation on the conception of genius came with significant personal costs and misrepresents the true nature of the writers’ powerful displays of joint creativity. Genius, I conclude, is not solely the provenance of individuals but an invaluable human capacity that can draw strength from both male and female participation.