first edition Hardcover
1940 · Boston
by Diver, Maud
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1940. First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . [book is nice and clean, minimal shelfwear, vintage bookseller's label (Daniels and Fisher Book Shop) at top of rear pastedown; jacket is a bit mangled at top of spine, one small tear at top of front panel, internally tape-mended across top of spine, otherwise just modestly edgeworn and lightly rubbed]. "The scene of [the novel] is England; the chief character, Sylvia Lyndon, who lives in a London flat and has a secret desire for the country and for an opportunity to bring up children." She finds an opportunity to fulfill that dream at age 44, when she falls in love with and marries a man eighteen years her junior. The was a late work by this author (published about five years before her death), and unusual for her in that it doesn't concern India, where she was born and spent her youth, and which was the setting for most of her fiction. (Like Rudyard Kipling, with whose sister she had a lifelong friendship, she was a specialist in the "imperial romance genre," according to Wikipedia -- but unlike Kipling, her literary reputation has not survived her.) . (Inventory #: 16249)