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Aulnoy, Madame d’ (Marie-Catherine).
[Amatory fiction by the ‘grandmother’ of the English novel]. The Prince of Carency; a Novel. Written in French by the Countess D'Aunois Author of the Lady's Travels into Spain. Translated into English.
Publisher: W. Wilkins, for J. Peele, at Locke’s-Head, between the Two Temple-Gates in Fleet-Street, London;
Date of Publication: 1719
Stock Code: 14889
First English edition. Octavo, pp., [iv], 382. sig., [A⁴] B-2A⁸. Contemporary Cambridge-style panel calf; spine on five bands. Head- and tail-pieces within text. Contemporary ownership inscription, obliterated, to front paste-down, pencil notes to end. Joints and hinges cracked, upper board a little loose but spine holding well. Spotting and toning to contents, mostly affecting margins. A used but serviceable copy. The first English edition of D’Aulnoy’s (1650 or 1651-1705) last novel. Set in the late fourteenth century, the book deals with real historical events, while telling a narrative of romance and adventure. The novel focuses on the travails of the fictive Leonida de Velasco and the real Prince de Carency (1378-1457). Set between Spain, France, Italy, Turkey, North Africa, and the Mediterranean sea, the story features dramatic separations, disguises, storms, and a kidnapping by Barbary Corsairs. Originally published in French as Historie de Jean de Bourbon, Prince de Carency (1692), this volume was translated anonymously, and significantly transformed into a sentimental novel with a happy ending. As one critic notes ‘Carency is better in English than in French’ (Palmer, 246). D’Aulnoy was a significant figure for the development of the English novel who was long overlooked. Writing originally in French in the mid-seventeenth century, D’Aulnoy was an author of fictive ‘memoirs’ which claimed to reveal sex scandals at the courts of European monarchs, including the court of Charles II, as well as a writer of fairy tales (she originated the term). Her epistolary works were recognised as novels by her contemporaries, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noted ‘Would you have me write novelles like the countess D’Anois? and is it not better to tell the plain truth?’ (Complete Letters, I.293). She was long regarded as a peddler in false gossip and hoaxes, and was only reappraised in the latter half of the twentieth-century as a precedent to the English novel. As the first scholarly treatment of D’Aulnoy argues ‘she was indeed moving towards [Samuel] Richardson: Pamela’s grandmothers were women like Mme D’Aulnoy’s Julia of Warwick, Leonida of Velasco, the Countess of Devonshire, and Doña de Castro’ (Palmer, 247). Her influence on professional women writers was profound. Delarivier Manley explicitly referenced D’Aulnoy as a ‘heroine’, and D’Aulnoy’s narratives of sex and scandal provided the ‘aesthetic ground’ for Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood (Ballaster, 42). A rare work of romantic fiction by one of the great influences on the development of the early English novel. £950.00