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Edgeworth, Maria; McGuiness, Norah (illus.).
The Most Unfortunate Day of My Life by Maria Edgeworth and also The Purple Jar The Two Plums The Thorn The Rabbit Waste Not, Want Not.
Publisher: Cobden-Sanderson, London;
Date of Publication: 1931
Stock Code: 14996
First edition, first printing of the cover story. Duodecimo, pp., [6], 178, plus colour-printed frontispiece and six full-page illustrated plates in McGuiness’ distinctive Modernist style within text. Original publisher’s crimson cloth, titled to paper spine label, in the rare original unclipped tan dust-wrapper, illustrated in red by McGuiness. Some loss to spine-tips of jacket, spine panel toned, some light soiling to outer panels. Binding strong and firm, minor spots of water-damage to joints continuing to hinges. Contents clean and free of annotations or inscriptions. A very good copy in like jacket. A remarkably late first edition of a collection of short stories by Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), in the rare dust-wrapper. Maria Edgeworth was ‘unrivalled among Irish women as an intellectual, working both as a literary writer and (in the broad sense) as an educationist’. The title story of this volume was, according to the dust-jacket blurb ‘found in an Old House in the South of Ireland’ the manuscript was ‘probably a Christmas present from Miss Edgeworth to one of the children of the family which was connected with hers, as she had bound her MS. carefully in scarlet leather’. The dust-jacket design and illustrations of Edgeworth’s previously lost story are by Norah McGuiness (1901-80), an Irish artist who would later be celebrated for her Cubist paintings. Early in her career, McGuiness illustrated novels (including Tristram Shandy in 1926), the line illustrations to this volume showcase her earlier style. The dust-jacket flaps are exceedingly narrow, no doubt contributing to so few copies of the jacket having survived. A first edition which brings together the literary and artistic contributions of two acclaimed Irish women a century apart. £125.00