Nora Grimes is a Trinity Research Doctorate Award funded PhD candidate in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin and an Early Career Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub for the Arts and Humanities. Her dissertation seeks to recentre the contributions of women theatre artists in both Irish and American theatre histories through the development of a transnational feminist genealogy. Her research interests are theatre history, feminism and gender in theatre, legal drama, and myth and mythmaking in historical and contemporary feminist theatre performance. She is a 2024-25 Edith and Richard French Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and a 2024-25 Short Term Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She is a Tutor at the Lir Academy and teaches on the Performance Analysis course at TCD.

This paper will consider how the women-theatre makers from the Inghinidhe na h’Éireann, Alice Milligan, and Lady Gregory envisioned an Irish national drama where women were centre stage, and by extension, demonstrated the power of women’s presence within the greater cultural nationalist movement. In the early 20^th century, Irish women artists and activists intentionally reclaimed and reimagined women from Irish folk history as a method of cultivating women’s space within the national and nationalist imaginations. Though they believed in different visions of what a national theatre should or could be, these artists and activists all advanced what Irish studies scholar Paige Reynolds (2007) considers to be “the powerful association in the public imagination between nationalism and female dramatic performance,” linking what happens in the cultural place of the theatre with the greater space of Irish cultural imagination in the Celtic revival (77). Women performers, then, and the queens and leaders they embodied onstage in devised tableaux or in plays by Milligan and Gregory, became a powerful public image of Irish womanhood in the fight for independence.  

Analysis of the extant plays and personal writings of these women will inform my consideration of both the imagined spaces within plays as well as the real places they were performed. This will be supplemented and challenged by both personal recollections of actors who embodied the characters for public performance. Additionally, I will use contemporary reviews of performances to demonstrate the ways in which these characters break out of the confines of the printed text or the stage and occupy new spaces within the greater cultural imagination. This work supports my ongoing doctoral research, which seeks to recenter the contributions of women theatre-artists in both Irish and American theatre histories through the development of a transnational feminist genealogy from 1900-1937.