London: John and Edward Bumpus, 1908.
Price: $1,500.00
Hardcover. First edition. Publisher's red cloth gilt. Tiny hole in front gutter, else near fine. Inscribed by the author: "To Violet Hunt from a humble admirer. May 8th. '08." the recipient was an important author of feminist novels, a suffragist, and grew up in the Pre-Raphaelite Circle.
Radclyffe-Hall's very uncommon second book, like the first, a slim volume of verse paid for by her proud grandmother. Lady Una Troubridge, Hall's nearly lifelong companion in her book *The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall* (1961), referring to Hall's first two volumes of verse: "I have poured over them many times, and so has their author, and neither of us was able to find anything worthy of survival in the first two volumes; in fact long before her death she made a determined effort to destroy any existing copies of the volumes in question, hoping to consign them to total oblivion. (One of the results of her efforts has been that collectors of her work are ready nowadays to pay quite a high price for either of these despised offspring of her idle youth!)." Although this might have been the case, no less than 21 of the poems were set to music by contemporary songwriters and it is through these songs that Hall met Mabel Batten (better known as Ladye), reportedly Hall's first fully requited lover.
Item #443017
