ANN LEE'S: And Other Stories

First edition, first printing. Original dark brown cloth lettered in black to spine and front panel, in the dustwrapper illustrated with a design from woodcuts by Celia M. Fiennes (the hat shop pictured is the titular 'Ann Lee's' of the opening story). A strikingly fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and black lettering clean and sharp, the contents bright and clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. The merest spotting to the page block edges and very light offsetting to free endpapers. Complete with the remarkably well-preserved original dustwrapper, showing just a few minor nicks and a touch of dustiness, the cover illustration still sharp and bright. The green lettering to the spine is a little faded but still easy to decipher. Unclipped and correctly priced 7s. 6d. net to the spine. A beautiful copy of the author's second book. Incredibly hard to find with the dustwrapper in any state; indeed Sellery and Harris, Bowen's bibliographer's, note in their entry for the volume that they have never seen the wrapper.

If the pervading image of Elizabeth Bowen is of the formidable Anglo-Irish grande dame of later years, dividing her time between Bowen's Court, the family home in north Cork, and Clarence Terrace in London, much of her finest writing was done when she was a young woman finding her feet in the literary world. 'Ann Lee's and Other Stories', published when she was twenty-five, was Bowen's second book and second collection of short stories. Three years earlier – the same year that Encounters, her first book, was published – Bowen married Alan Cameron (at the time Assistant Secretary for Education for Northamptonshire, he later worked for the BBC), to whom this collection is dedicated. The couple had moved into 73 Knights Lane, Kingsthorpe, in Northampton, described by Bowen's aunt as "a horrid little house". It was there, however, that she wrote the stories collected in 'Ann Lee's', as well as her first novel, 'The Hotel', both books revealing a new maturity of voice. "I was now located, the mistress of a house", she later wrote, "and the sensation of living anywhere, as apart from paying a succession of visits, was new to me." Writing about these stories, the novelist Tessa Hadley notes that the "contained form and the mannered stylishness [of Encounters] persists, along with the author's all-seeing irony [...]; yet the work grows stranger, and more sympathetic. [...] Bowen's stories don't break the genre frame; rather, they swell it from the inside and make it strange." The first edition was published on 14 April 1926 in an edition of 2,000 copies. (Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: A Biography [London: 1977]; Tessa Hadley, Hats One Dreamed about, London Review of Books, 20 February 2020; Sellery and Harris A2a.).