Singular Pluralities: Titles of Yeats’s Autobiographies

Abstract

Yeats had signed the preface of Reveries over Childhood and Youth ( Wade 111 [p. 119]) on Christmas Day 1914. Production was not finished at the Cuala Press until All Hallows’ Eve 1915, and the volume was not published until 20 March 1916. A coloured reproduction of Jack B. Yeats’s 1900 water-colour “Memory Harbour”, mounted on a black sheet, appears in a separate portfolio entitled Plates to accompany Reveries over Childhood and Youth, which also includes a John Butler Yeats self-portrait and drawing of Susan Yeats. There are two curious features about the two-volume set: its overall title is Reveries over Childhood and Youth but the text volume contains, in addition to a short preface, only A Reverie over Childhood and Youth (a discrepancy which remains throughout its subsequent printings). Why, therefore, the plural title? And why the delay in its initial production?