Rare First Edition Superb Jacket (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. VERY RARE in this condition, and utterly collectable - this classic novel has a breadth of conception and an outstanding imagination; it is a cult classic, an astonishing piece of work that delights and entertains. This copy is the best one I have ever seen. The unclipped jacket close to perfect, especially considering its age. A work of rare achievement, and written with a poet's sensitivity. It has immense originality and it is hugely entertaining. Mrs Bratbe's August Picnic, published in 1965, reflected that. Anthony Burgess, one of several appreciative reviewers, wrote: 'Mrs Wheldon's Mrs Bratbe is as outrageous a prodigy as we have had this side of the war.'She then began work on a novel entitled Daughters of the Flood. During the next 15 years this spread to nine volumes and upwards of two million words. Those who have read parts of it, including James Hale, her editor, and Richard Simon, her agent, are emphatic about its force and originality. Hale pleaded with her to let him bring it out one volume at a time, but she was consumed with the idea of its wholeness and would not let it go. It obsessed her during those years, but after the death of her mother she lost interest in publishing it.From then on she was either content or self-condemned to write for writing's sake. The family moved to a magnificent house on Richmond Hill. The hospitality continued but Jay withdrew a little, sadly driven to this by an increasing deafness. For one as brilliant in conversation as she was, it was a cruel affliction. She wrote plays - one of which the Royal Court wanted to do but she preferred not to make the changes they suggested - poems, critical essays and long, Hertzogian letters. In the early 1980s her friends Norman and Midge Podhoretz asked her to become the UK executive director of the Committee for the Free World, briefly the intellectual opposition to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Its members were few, about 150, but distinguished: Bellow in the US, Stoppard in the UK. By that time her thinking was more Oakeshott than Laski.