THE HISTORY OF EMILY MONTAGUE
First edition of the first novel in English written in and about British Canada.
Very good.
Price: $3,500.00
THE HISTORY OF EMILY MONTAGUE
"By transplanting the British novel of courtship to the New World, Brooke gained not only travel-book matter but also a new multicultural perspective from which to view the institution of marriage and the role of women in British society." – Katherine Sobba Green
Brooke was an influential and celebrated novelist of the 18th century: in one of the earliest histories of the English novel, she's described as "perhaps the first novel-writer who attained a perfect purity and polish of style" (Barbauld, English Novelists, 27: i; quoted in Corman 33). Brooke was one of a number of novelists working in the sentimental tradition in this era, publishing alongside other respected writers like Charlotte Smith, Sarah Fielding, and Samuel Richardson (who also served as publisher for a number of women writers in this period). In fact, it is through Brooke as translator that one of the biggest influences on the English sentimental novel and the era's trend of the epistolary form, French author Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's LETTERS FROM JULIET, LADY CATESBY, TO HER FRIEND, LADY HENRIETTA CAMPLEY (1760), became available to the English reading public.
An epistolary novel set in Montreal and composed while Brooke was living there, EMILY MONTAGUE is highly sought as a landmark in Canadian fiction. It is also an excellent example of how a marriage plot can serve as a framing device for the exploration of women's lives and choices in fiction. The novel features an unusual change in the marriage scene at the end, in which the hero asks that the word "obey" be removed from the wording used in the vows at the wedding.
Read more: Corman, Women Novelists Before Jane Austen: Their Critics and Their Canons; Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre, 62.
The Object
London: Printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall Mall, 1769. Four 12mo volumes, 6.5'' x 4'' each. Full contemporary speckled calf, raised bands, red goatskin spine labels, gilt-ruled spine compartments with gilt-stamped volume numbers. Errata leaf at rear of vol. IV. [8], 240; [4], 240; [4], 223, [1]; [4], 213, [3] pages. Collated complete. Small pencil portrait on rear blank of vol. III. Rear blanks of vol. II with tear resulting in some loss to corners. Boards with faint moderate white smudging; contemporary bindings a bit dry, with crackling to spines and shallow chipping to some volumes.
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