The Art of Being Found Out

Colm Tóibín

On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue. She left her home, I think, with another man – and left her two young daughters. The episode was brief and disastrous – the other man left her in turn, and the husband took her back.’ James then went on to outline the details, as told to him by Lady Gregory, of the husband taking her back. It came with a condition: that she would stay until the daughters arrived at a certain age, and then she would leave. The husband had fixed a particular date in a particular year when she would be ejected, and when the date arrived, the wife was put out and the story explained to the daughters.