In the decade that followed the death of her husband, Sir William Gregory, in 1892, Augusta Gregory reinvented herself. In her act of self-redefinition, she selected new role models and guises for her life. With her collaborator W. B. Yeats she dramatised a spiritual self-portrait in the form of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, who walks away from the action, young again, at the end of the play of that name. This process of rejuvenation and self-reinvention was familiar to her collaborator, Yeats, who theorised that the poet is “reborn as an idea, something intended, complete” and who famously stated, “It is myself that I remake” (Essays and Introductions 509; “Untitled Poem” line 4). Gregory imagined her role as a dramatist and editor in medical terms: “I am rather a good play doctor,” she wrote in a letter to writer Thomas Joseph Kiernan on 28 November 1928, when she was telling him that “I have been helping some of our authors—old & new—to get their plays right” (qtd. in New York Public Library, Bulletin 26). She imitated models and guides that she took from her locality: one was the folk healer Biddy Early. Another was Cathleen Ni Houlihan herself, the protagonist from the eponymous single-act play about a cailleach (the Irish word for a hag but also a sovereignty goddess associated with the territory of Ireland) who transforms from old to young. This reinvented self and the state of being reborn is relevant at a national and personal level for Gregory. Biddy Early and Cathleen Ni Houlihan are linked together. According to Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, the cailleach is connected to the bean feasa or wise woman as well as “the bean ghlúine (midwife)” and “the bean chaointe (keening-woman)” (29). Both Biddy Early and Cathleen Ni Houlihan are forms of healer and when Gregory reinvented herself, the model of healing woman was one on which she drew.