An unusual, familial presentation copy of Elizabeth Wade White and Prentiss Taylor’s delightful Garland of Herbs, which celebrates borage, rue, and saffron crocus, amongst others, pairing C17th quotations and recipes selected by White with illustrations by the American lithographer and fine press printer (see image on page 2 also); issued by Taylor’s Winter Wheat Press and inscribed by White to her formidable maternal grandmother, Martha Starkweather Wade, in December 1936, on the cusp of her move to England and a more radical life.
In the 1930s, Prentiss Taylor (1907-1991) also collaborated with writers and musicians associated with the Harlem Renaissance, most famously with his friend, Langston Hughes; together they founded the Golden Stair Press. Taylor was the lover of the composer Aaron Copland, a fellow MacDowell Fellow.
Elizabeth Wade White (1906–1994) was an American writer, poet, activist and rare bookseller, perhaps best known today as the lover of the British poet Valentine Ackland, the partner of Sylvia Townsend Warner. She was “also extremely wealthy, an old-monied Episcopalian New Englander, who valued her descent from Ann Bradstreet, the early settler known as America’s first published woman poet [who White researched over many decades, including at Oxford, and eventually published a study of in 1971]” (Bingham, 2021). In 1937, a year after the publication of this pamphlet, White moved to Dorset to meet up with Townsend Warner and Ackland and to volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee as a relief worker in Spain. Over the next two years she made several trips to Spain, but suffered a nervous breakdown in late 1938 and returned to Dorset where she spent Christmas with Ackland and Warner, becoming Ackland’s lover (with disastrous consequences for all three women). White’s left-leaning politics and Bohemian life resulted in her being disinherited by her mother. It was White’s maternal grandmother, Martha Starkweather Wade
(1854-1946), who provided her with a home, the Patch in Middlebury, Connecticut in 1945, a year before the older woman’s death. White lived there with her lover Evelyn Holahan, and the couple ran their rare book business, White & Holahan, Books, from the Patch.
Frances Bingham (2021) Valentine Ackland: A transgressive life (Bath: Handheld Press) [ref: 3301]