SCHREINER, Olive. Undine. With an introduction by S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner. London: Ernest Benn. 1929. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s patterned brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the gloriously evocative dust jacket designed by Barbara. A very good copy. The cloth clean, bright and sharp, the binding tight and gently rolled. The contents clean and fine throughout with a few very mild marks to front endpaper. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), the front flap almost detached, bearing the brief and thankfully quickly banished trend of excising the blurb to ‘send it to the friend who is continually asking you to recommend a good novel’. Gently rubbed and very slightly nicked to extremities, light spots to the white segments, but delightful nonetheless.
Written in the 1870s and abandoned there—when Schreiner was sixteen—Undine, posthumously published some nine years after her death, has historically been dismissed as juvenilia within Schreiner academia, the antecedent to her famed The Story of an African Farm (1883). Yet recent scholarship shows a growing interest in the novel, supposing it should be thought instead as a sort of companion volume to her opus, the two her only semi-autobiographical novels, both displaying many of the themes which elevated Schreiner as one of the leading lights of feminist thought in the late nineteenth century. It follows a young woman who, on her return to South Africa, discovers her childhood sweetheart has died, and vows to spend the night before the burial with his body. Frustratingly, I can find little on the dust jacket designer, Barbara.
SCHREINER, Olive. Undine. With an introduction by S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner. London: Ernest Benn. 1929. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s patterned brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the gloriously evocative dust jacket designed by Barbara. A very good copy. The cloth clean, bright and sharp, the binding tight and gently rolled. The contents clean and fine throughout with a few very mild marks to front endpaper. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), the front flap almost detached, bearing the brief and thankfully quickly banished trend of excising the blurb to ‘send it to the friend who is continually asking you to recommend a good novel’. Gently rubbed and very slightly nicked to extremities, light spots to the white segments, but delightful nonetheless.
Written in the 1870s and abandoned there—when Schreiner was sixteen—Undine, posthumously published some nine years after her death, has historically been dismissed as juvenilia within Schreiner academia, the antecedent to her famed The Story of an African Farm (1883). Yet recent scholarship shows a growing interest in the novel, supposing it should be thought instead as a sort of companion volume to her opus, the two her only semi-autobiographical novels, both displaying many of the themes which elevated Schreiner as one of the leading lights of feminist thought in the late nineteenth century. It follows a young woman who, on her return to South Africa, discovers her childhood sweetheart has died, and vows to spend the night before the burial with his body. Frustratingly, I can find little on the dust jacket designer, Barbara.
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