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Fine condition dark blue cloth boards with gold front cover and spine lettering contained in a good condition non price-clipped ($5.00) color illustrated dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by H.F.M. Prescott; Author Dedication; Author's Note; (Floor) Plan of Marrick Priory; and Historical Note. The upper and lower jacket spine edges have large chips, and scattered edgewear; the front and rear covers nevertheless remain in very good condition with still very vibrant colors. (see photographs). The blank front free endpaper contains a vintage 1-/30/52 date and town with previous owner name blackened out. All other pages are in fine unmarked condition and the binding is exceedingly tight and square (see photographs). "This is an extraordinary historical novel. The author calls it a chronicle. It chronicles the lives of five main persons: Christabel Cowper, the Prioress of Marrick, who loves power and will do what she must to keep it; Thomas, Lord Darcy, who loves honor, and will fight, if need be, to defend it; the bastard girl, Julian, who loves one man, and would give her own life to save his; Robert Aske, squire, whose integrity impels him to treason; Gilbert Dawe, priest, who cannot love, but only hate. And there is a sixth: the serving woman, Malle, who cannot hate, but only love, and who knows from the depths of her simplicity that love is the man on a donkey. It chronicles the tragic history of the North Country rebellion, called by the rebels themselves the Pilgrimage of Grace, by which the commons and their captains tried in 1536 to save the monasteries from suppression, and to stay the hand of King Henry VIII in his attack on the ancient Church. It chronicles the whole texture of life in early 16th century England, from the Royal Court to the peasant's hovel, from the moil of London to the broad fields and hills of the quiet shires. All these things this extraordinary book brings alive, but more remarkably, it chronicles, by indirection, the very impulses and purposes of the lives of its present-day readers and makes them, too, come a little more alive." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. "This is a great and shattering book, and it has the power of translating anguish into vision .The writing is of extraordinary quality, as gentle as the spring hedgerows, as stark as the body of Robert Aske, hanging in chains from York Keep." - Helen Waddell. "In the past Miss Prescott has been novelist, historian, translator - and, in all three kinds, an artist in words. Now she has focused her gifts on the writing of the almost perfect historical novel .a beautiful book, beautifully written." - Eustage Perry, The Spectator. "Her book is a unique achievement. It blends fine scholarship with great literary imagination and it has a sweep and a breadth that one had forgotten could belong to the historical novel .(Miss Prescott) has seized on a great theme and treated it magnificently .It is undoubtedly one of the finest historical novels written in this century." - John Raymond, The New Statesman and Nation. "A very good book indeed. Magnificent reconstruction of the living past." - The Times Literary Supplement. "The Golden Warrior by Hope Muntz and H.F.M. Prescott's The Man on a Donkey are two of the most interesting novels of the last five years. They are historical novels - the last is a scholar's brilliant evocation of life in the England of Henry VIII - and they are immensely superior to the faked-up, costume stuff we usually get in historical fiction." - New York Times (Literary Letter from London, by V.S. Pritchett). Seller Inventory # 005271
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