The healer in the tower: Biddy Early and discourses of healing in the work of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory

Abstract

ABSTRACT The folk healer Biddy Early (1798–1874) is perhaps now best remembered in association with a mythical curse on the Clare hurling side. This article explores her healing practices and the significance of her life and legend to William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. Writings by both these key revivalists, and their collaborative play The Pot of Broth (1904), testify to the continuing and ambivalent presence of Early’s memory in the decades after her death. Gregory and Yeats spread the fame of Early as part of their revivalist project, and the latter rebuilt the tower he christened Thoor Ballylee with, among other things, the “old mill boards” where she had once, according to local lore, gathered her ingredients. This article looks at the place of Early in Yeats’s and Gregory’s imaginations, and seeks to reposition this non-elite woman as one of the culture-givers of the Revival period.