RETROSPECTION
First edition of "the first world history ever written by [a British] woman" (William McCarthy, 211).
Very good.
Price: $1,200.00
RETROSPECTION
"[Its] merit lies in [its] authoress' extremely personal use of the academic genres to which [it] belongs, demonstrating a persistent determination and unremitting search for authorship in a literary world still dominated by men." — Marianna D'Ezio
An evocative, philosophical, and narrative-driven history, RETROSPECTION took an experimental approach to the genre, attempting to cure it of its stuffiness. Panned by one contemporary critic as "History cooked up in a novel form reduced to light reading for boarding school misses, and loungers at a watering place," these are the exact reasons the book is interesting to us today. In fact, the modern scholar William McCarthy calls it "a work of great daring in every way" (210). It covers the first century CE to the year 1800, relying upon sources ancient (Livy, the Bible) and modern (Gibbon, Hume), all buttressed by Piozzi's famous breezy charm. An eccentric tour de force and an unsophisticated copy, quite difficult to obtain without repairs to the joints or spine.
Read more: Rothschild Library: A Catalogue, 1553; McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman; D'Ezio, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi: A Taste for Eccentricity.
The Object
London: John Stockdale, 1801. Two quarto volumes, 10'' x 8.25'' each. Contemporary half calf, blue paste-paper boards, raised bands, gilt-stamped spines, red goatskin spine labels. Speckled edges. Engraved frontispiece portrait of the author. Bound without half titles and eight-page publisher's catalogue; with the four-page proposals for maps. xvi, 17-461, [1]; pages. Some rubbing to bindings; frontispiece faintly foxed. Firm.
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