THE PROFILE HOUSE
Rare first edition of this unusual New Hampshire travelogue novel with shades of JANE EYRE, featuring a heroine who wants to attend a university and refuses to get married.
Very good.
Price: $1,500.00
THE PROFILE HOUSE
"Don't read about women's colleges, Edie. You're too young to trouble your head about such things."
PROFILE HOUSE is the story of young Edith, who dreams of attending the not-yet-founded Simmons College but must instead travel as paid companion to the mountain Profile House. The novel opens with a newspaper account of John Simmons's 1870 bequest providing $1.4 million for "the foundation of a woman's college, wherein girls are to be taught medicine, music, drawing, designing, telegraphing, and other branches of art, science and industry" so as to earn an independent livelihood. As this is not a novel promoting Curtiss's native Boston, but rather the grand New Hampshire hotel of the title, the heroine is soon barred from her dream of a Simmons education and dispatched to live with a grumbling invalid and the intermittent presence of several horrible young men.
At length the party makes its way to the famous Profile House where, after a tour of the Franconia mountains, Edith withstands several horrible marriage proposals in quick succession and ends the book triumphant, "resolved never to enter into one of the marriages of convenience of which she had seen so many during the past six months, not even if she lived unmarried always." Scarce, with only six holdings listed via OCLC (and none at any women's colleges). A remarkable if disjointed ode to staunch New England feminism, independence, and the New Hampshire tourist trade.
Read more: Dora de Blaquiere, "Women's 'Noms de Plume'," The Girl's Own Paper.
The Object
First printing. Boston: Andrew F. Graves, 1872. 6.5'' x 4.25''. Original black and gilt-stamped red pictorial cloth. 274, [2] pages. The White Mountain Series. Light edgewear and bumping, moderate spine lean. Offsetting to endpapers.
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