Ariel: A Shelley Romance


Book Description
FIRST ILLUSTRATED EDITION. 8vo, pp. [viii], 310, [2 catalogue] + colour frontis and 7 illustrations. Quarter black cloth with marbled boards, gilt stamped lettering to spine. Blue stain to top edge (faded), others untrimmed. Pushing and wear to spine ends, corners and top edge. Some foxing, else, clean and tidy, with the plates nice and bright. Very good. A pleasing copy of an attractive edition.
Dealer Notes
Maurois’ fictionalised Jazz Age biography of Shelley, translated from the French by short story writer and Yellow Book editor, Ella D’Arcy. One of the ‘romance biographies’ that followed the success of Stratchey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), Maurois (through D’Arcy) renders Shelley as ‘a demigod with flashing eyes, a shirt-collar open on a delicate throat, and hair as fine as spun silk,’ while his second wife, author of Frankenstein is ‘Mary of the nut-brown eyes […] slim and true as a Toledo blade’. Ariel went on to be the first title published by Penguin Books.
Author
MAUROIS, André; D’Arcy, Ella (translator); Jacquier (illustrator)
Date
1925
Publisher
London: John Lane The Bodley Head
Condition
Very good
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