Article: A mixture of Bovril and champagne

Augusta Gregory's early life could have been dreamed up by Trollope. In 1880 the plain, intelligent daughter of the Philistine, horsy Persse clan in County Galway, on the shelf at 27, astounds local society by marrying Sir William Gregory of the neighbouring Coole Park. He is a 62-year-old liberal-Conservative grandee, retired governor of Ceylon and ex-MP for the county, familiar with London salons, a friend of Tennyson and Browning: he may, in fact, have been one of the inspirations behind Phineas Finn. Augusta exchanges a life spent trailing around estate cottages with her frantically evangelical mother for a house at Hyde Park Corner hung with Velzquez paintings, long sojourns in ...

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