A MARSH ISLAND
First edition of what has been described as "the first American gay novel" (McLaughlin).
Very good.
Price: $1,200.00
A MARSH ISLAND
While A MARSH ISLAND is nominally the story of a love triangle (between the "girlish" Dick Dale, a Manhattan landscape painter visiting New England's Great Salt Marsh, a local farmer's daughter Doris Owens, and her all-but-affianced beau Dan Lester), it is also — according to Dr. Don James McLaughlin (Assistant Professor of 19th-Century American Literature at the University of Tulsa) in his 2023 critical edition of MARSH ISLAND — a novel of "queer kinship and same-sex domesticity." Ultimately Jewett's tale becomes an "intricate web of compulsory heterosexuality" (ibid). However, Dale's return to New York and the studio he shares with a young man named Bradish ("Welcome home, my love") and their obvious relief at being together again ("I used to wish for you with all my heart") reflect "Jewett's effort to recreate aspects of her domestic partnership" (ibid) with Boston socialite Annie Fields (a so-called Boston Marriage), which was in its earliest years when Jewett wrote A MARSH ISLAND. A compelling entry in the early canon of gay American literature, which Jewett herself considered her "best story."
Read more: McLaughlin, "The Unbounded Terrain of Companionship," in Q19 Series edition of A Marsh Island; Blanck, Bibliography of American Literature (BAL), 10885.
The Object
First printing. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885. 7'' x 4.75''. Publisher's original two-tone green cloth with gilt-stamped spine titles and black-stamped titles and decoration to front board. [2], 292 pages, with 12 pages of publisher ads at rear. Slight spine lean. Boards with some wear to corners and spine ends, light soil and toning. Light marginal toning to text block, couple unobtrusive spots of soil.
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