KENNY, Meave. I'll Change the Colour, or A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age. London: Peter Davies. 1935. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s pale blue cloth lettered in yellow to the spine, in the dust jacket. A very good or better copy, the cloth perhaps a trifle faded at backstrip and extremities, very gently bumped, but the binding tight and square. The contents generally clean with some mild spots to textblock edges and very occasionally within, with small previous owner signature in ink to front endpaper. The dust jacket priced 7/6 net to spine, with a little rubbing to the corners and spine tips, joints, but an altogether handsome copy.
An interesting roman-à-clef about a once-great Galway family, slowly disintegrating amid the fight for Irish independence and the outbreak of the First World War. More fact than fiction, the novel is told through the eyes of the young author confined to a Dublin convent as the men in her family die or are killed; by the Germans, by the British, or by old age. Her father, a Sinn Féin revolutionary, survives but is criminalised and banned from his homeland for joining the war effort. Postwar, father and child travel Europe and India to broaden the cause for independence against British rule, while the young girl seeks to enter the medical world. Little is known of Kenny’s childhood, but the struggle to penetrate a masculine world in this novel was a mirror and precursor to her own struggles; she was a trailblazing obstetrician and gynaecologist and the her much-debated applications to previously male-centric roles, which were ultimately often successful, form part of her small legacy. This is her only novel and is scarce.
KENNY, Meave. I'll Change the Colour, or A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age. London: Peter Davies. 1935. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s pale blue cloth lettered in yellow to the spine, in the dust jacket. A very good or better copy, the cloth perhaps a trifle faded at backstrip and extremities, very gently bumped, but the binding tight and square. The contents generally clean with some mild spots to textblock edges and very occasionally within, with small previous owner signature in ink to front endpaper. The dust jacket priced 7/6 net to spine, with a little rubbing to the corners and spine tips, joints, but an altogether handsome copy.
An interesting roman-à-clef about a once-great Galway family, slowly disintegrating amid the fight for Irish independence and the outbreak of the First World War. More fact than fiction, the novel is told through the eyes of the young author confined to a Dublin convent as the men in her family die or are killed; by the Germans, by the British, or by old age. Her father, a Sinn Féin revolutionary, survives but is criminalised and banned from his homeland for joining the war effort. Postwar, father and child travel Europe and India to broaden the cause for independence against British rule, while the young girl seeks to enter the medical world. Little is known of Kenny’s childhood, but the struggle to penetrate a masculine world in this novel was a mirror and precursor to her own struggles; she was a trailblazing obstetrician and gynaecologist and the her much-debated applications to previously male-centric roles, which were ultimately often successful, form part of her small legacy. This is her only novel and is scarce.
