Illustrations of Lying, In All Its Branches

Book Description

London: Published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825. 2 vols., 12mo. With the half-titles. In a somewhat unusual contemporary binding of linen-backed boards, the whole overlaid with paper stained to look like tree calf, spines gilt with morocco labels; paper overlay chipped from spine extremities, still a large, sound, and agreeable copy. First edition, printed in Norwich, where the author had returned to live with her father after the death of her husband in 1807. Sometime in the early 1820s Mrs. Opie became a committed Quaker and decided that full-blown fiction was against the Friends’ precepts. But works like Illustrations of Lying were, she felt, acceptable because they used fiction to good moral effect, here especially exposing social competition and self-interest. Block, English Novel, p. 176.

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