While we are absent

Leighton, Ann [pseud. of Isadore Smith]

Published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1943

About this Item

Jacket drawing by Frederick Wallace and Leonard De. First Edition. [8], [1]-231, [1] pages. 8vo. Publisher's salmon cloth decorated in green. Dust jacket in matching salmon, white, and black. Dust jacket with tearing, creasing and wear mostly along the top edge. Small puncture mark in the front dj joint area. Original $2.50 price still present. Spine slanted. Little, Brown & Company review slip laid in, noting that the date of publication is due to be Apr. 20, 1943, and asking the Literary Editor to please withhold their review until that date. Bright and clean internally, presents nicely on the shelf. Cloth. Scarce in commerce, especially in dust jacket. This copy found in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Ann's stomping grounds. "Ann Leighton was the professional name of Isadore Smith (1902-1985), the renowned garden historian, scholar, author, designer, and landscape architect who, with Kitty Weeks, designed the colonial-themed gardens at the Weeks Brick House. Isadore Leighton (Luce) Smith was a native of Portsmouth, N.H., and graduated from Smith College in 1923. She married Col. A. William Smith, a British Army veteran of WWI, and lived most of her life in Ipswich, Mass. While living on Argilla Road in Ipswich during WWII, she wrote While We Are Absent, a book about the challenge of maintaining home and raising her children while her husband, who once again answered his country s call in wartime, was serving in Europe. Among many commissions, she designed the garden at the 1677 Whipple House, which is owned by the Ipswich Historical Society. Over many years Mrs. Smith combined her encyclopedic knowledge of early gardens with New England history in three volumes, the first of which, Early American Gardens: For Meate or Medicine, was published under the pseudonym of Ann Leighton by Houghton Mifflin Co. in 1970. A second volume, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: For Use or For Delight, was published in 1976. A third volume, American Gardens in the Nineteenth Century and After: For Comfort and Delight, was published posthumously in 1987 by the University of Massachusetts Press. The trilogy of 1350 pages of scholarship is still in print today. Isadore Smith neatly summed up the staying power of her subject matter in a brief book-jacket teaser: "While buildings may decay and crumble, the plants of every age are still with us and need only to be collected and replanted to speak for the time and its people."" (from the web page of Weeks Brick House & Gardens). This book, "While we are absent" is a "chronicle of three valiant years [while her husband was away in the service]. It is the love story of an American wife whose husband went into the British Army while she stayed at home in their little country place in New England with its fruit trees, its hedges, its garden, and its dogs." "Though she writes with wit, Ann Leighton speaks from the heart, and what she says will be recognized as the truth by every wife whose husband is away in the service." (from the front dj flap) "A graduate of Smith whose two sons are at college and whose daughter is in boarding school. ANN LEIGHTON is fast approaching that period of unemployment which she feels is the destiny of the American matron. During the war when her husband was overseas she ran the household, did the gardening, tended the bank account an experience which she has recorded in her book, While We Are Absent. At that time, the prospect of being fifty seemed one of sanctuary and peace. Then at last she would have leisure. Leisure for what? Ann Leighton June 1, 1952" (from the Atlantic).

Seller Inventory # 29676

Bibliographic Details

• Title: While we are absent
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company, Boston, Massachusetts
• Publication Date: 1943
• Binding: Cloth
• Illustrator: Jacket drawing by Frederick Wallace and Leonard De
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • New England & Northeast
  • Women Writers
  • Biography/Autobiography
  • Military History