Lady Gregory's codicil to will

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)

Codicil to Will, ribbon copy

March 1, 1930

In 1930 and 1931, Gregory completed two new wills and then revised each of these by adding codicils. Her principal concern in the codicils was to ensure that her unpublished autobiographical writings would be attended to with care and that proper discretion should be used in deciding what should and should not be published from them. Unfortunately, her last codicil was improperly witnessed, leaving it legally invalid. Her shifting instructions led to disagreements between Yeats and Margaret Gregory and strains with Constant Huntington, director of the Putnam publishing house, as to who had authority to make decisions. In the event, Gregory’s autobiography, Seventy Years, was not published until 1974, and her Journals only appeared in full in two volumes in 1978 and 1987.