When Sir William died in 1892 he left his widow two parting gifts. The means to live an independent life, and Coole Park, the house that would become a hub of the Celtic Revival. Augusta moved with her young song Robert to her husbands estate in the west of Ireland. Coole Park must have seemed a far cry from the glamorous and exotic world she had travelled in the twelve years with Sir William. She was forty when she returned here. But her life was about to enter its most creative and exciting phase. She had arrived back in Ireland at what proved to be a turning point in its history which she later explained in these terms.
“I would trace the intellectual movement back to the moment after Parnell’s death. For twelve years before he died the whole imagination behind Irish men was taken up with the land war. There was nothing else thought of, but the farmer and the landlord. The one pitted against the other.
After Parnell’s death his party broke. It was pretty much like the disbanding of an army. They had lost the keenness of the fight. And then the imagination of Irish men, looked about for something to pitch on. And that imagination turned to this dramatic form.