Jean And Jean And Ford And Stella

QUARTET

By Jean Rhys

(1971)

Inscribed first Harper & Row edition, review copy, of Rhys's first novel — originally published in the UK as POSTURES (1928) and reappearing here under the author's preferred title.

Very good plus in very good plus jacket.

Price: $1,000.00

QUARTET

"It was no good arguing, there she was, the villain of the piece; and it hurt, of course."

The four halves of the two couples fictionalized in QUARTET (Jean Rhys and Jean Lenglet, Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen) each wrote their own version of the Rhys-Ford affair (as a novel, a novel, a novel, and a memoir, respectively) — but with QUARTET, the first-published of the four works and the greatest as literature, Rhys gave herself the last word as well as the first. This edition's dust jacket praises her in the words of Ford Madox Ford, whose literary judgments were sounder, or more sensible, or anyway more lasting than his romantic ones: "a terrifying insight and a terrific — an almost lurid! — passion for stating the case of the underdog." Carole Angier called the two of them "perhaps the two greatest artists of self-pity in English fiction," and self-pity is certainly the greatest of all English literary subjects. A handsome copy, fondly inscribed; scarce thus.

Read more: Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work; Mellown, Jean Rhys: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography, A2d.

The Object

First printing. New York: Harper & Row, (1971). 8'' x 5.5''. Original orange cloth spine with blind-stamped olive-drab boards. Orange endpapers. In original unclipped ($4.95) dust jacket. 186 pages. Inscribed by Rhys "For Frank / with best wishes" on half-title page, dated September 16th, 1974. Original publisher's review slip laid in. Light toning and soil to rear jacket panel and top edge of text block.

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