ARNOT ROBERTSON, Eileen [Arbuthnot]. Ordinary Families. London: Jonathan Cape. 1933. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in white to the spine, with illustration in white to front board, and in the matching dust jacket designed by J. Z. Atkinson. With the publisher’s order form for two of her other novels loosely inserted. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, a trifle bumped, but the binding tight and square. The textblock edges gently spotted, but the contents fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), complete, a trifle rubbed at extremities with mild foxing, but very sharp overall.
The author’s fourth novel, all of which have been endorsed by the Virago Modern Classics series. Arnot Robertson was a best-selling author and one of the most read novelists in 1930s Britain, but the zeitgeist is a slender beast and she was swiftly unremembered as a middlebrow novelist, unjustly so given this evidence. It details a decade or so of the not-so-ordinary Rush family of the Suffolk marshes, and in particular of Lallie, coming of age and troubling herself with love, ‘carving a space for herself in the shadow of her beautiful sister Margaret, who claims the lion’s share of everything’. Uncommon.
ARNOT ROBERTSON, Eileen [Arbuthnot]. Ordinary Families. London: Jonathan Cape. 1933. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in white to the spine, with illustration in white to front board, and in the matching dust jacket designed by J. Z. Atkinson. With the publisher’s order form for two of her other novels loosely inserted. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, a trifle bumped, but the binding tight and square. The textblock edges gently spotted, but the contents fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), complete, a trifle rubbed at extremities with mild foxing, but very sharp overall.
The author’s fourth novel, all of which have been endorsed by the Virago Modern Classics series. Arnot Robertson was a best-selling author and one of the most read novelists in 1930s Britain, but the zeitgeist is a slender beast and she was swiftly unremembered as a middlebrow novelist, unjustly so given this evidence. It details a decade or so of the not-so-ordinary Rush family of the Suffolk marshes, and in particular of Lallie, coming of age and troubling herself with love, ‘carving a space for herself in the shadow of her beautiful sister Margaret, who claims the lion’s share of everything’. Uncommon.
