Cook Edith Bessie (1 results)

Quarter cloth, paper boards. Condition: Very Good. FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. 101, [1], [2 adverts]. Original quarter oatmeal linen cloth, blue-grey paper boards, title panels, lettered in black, to spine and upper board. Edges untrimmed. Corners bumped, edges foxed. Edith Bessie Cook's illustrated ex libris to front pastedown, plus: "E.C., March 1922" to ffep, offsetting and tanning to feps, occasional scattered foxing. Else, clean and bright. Very good A lovely first edition copy of Vita Sackville-West's third poetry collection, featuring the charming (and self-referential) ex libris of a contemporary reader, Edith Bessie Cook. As suggested by her leisured ex libris, designed by Edward J. Wheeler, Edith Bessie Cook of Warfield Hall, Berkshire, thoroughly enjoyed (and recognised) the cultured pleasures afforded by her middle-class station, including Morris furniture and interiors, alongside VSW's poetry. A year after the publication of Orchard and Vineyard, VSW and Virginia Woolf met for the first time (an experience which flustered the novelist, who wrote of her future lover: "Not much to my severe taste florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist," but who, nevertheless made "me feel virgin, shy, schoolgirlish", prompting the "muzzy-headed" Woolf to ask the poet for a copy of Orchard and Vineyard (Glendinning, 1983). While the "common reader" in 1921 would not have had "the key" to the collection, "[k]nowing the background, [as Woolf likely did from the literary London gossip] a reader can trace the emotional confusions of the preceding years in Orchard and Vineyard" (ibid). In this gallimaufry, alongside the poems of Kent (some of which would be incorporated into The Land) and the Mediterranean, others railed against society during "the worst times of the Violet affair" (ibid). VSW's affair with Violet Trefusis, and The Land, would subsequently make their way into Woolf's Orlando. A fruity and fruitful collection, then. Victoria Glendinning (1983) Vita: The life of V. Sackville-West (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).…