"the theatres may tremble”

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)

Typed journal entry

September 24, 1925

Gregory’s detailed 1920s journals give a comprehensive account of her later literary and personal life. Here, she sees her first color movie, a Western based on a Zane Grey novel, in Dublin with the Yeatses. It was “a very great improvement on the black and white” she declares, and shrewdly anticipates that when “some invention” allows silent movies to give “the words as well, the theatres may tremble.” After dinner, Yeats reads her passages from the proofs of his forthcoming occult volume A Vision, some of which she finds “quite unintelligible.” Though briefly put out when the book classifies her in the same category as Queen Victoria, she privately notes: “I don’t think she could have written Seven Short Plays.”