A London Girl of the Eighties

London: Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milford. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1936. First Edition. Hardcover. [a lovely copy, no discernible wear to book at all apart from a touch of discoloration to the endpapers, and the original publisher's slip affixed to the front pastedown; the jacket is bright and colorful, with just a bit of vertical creasing in the spine]. (B&W photographic plates) The second in this author's series of four memoirs, published between 1934 and 1940, the stated purpose of which was "to show that Victorian children did not have such a dull time as is usually supposed." Critic Adam Gopnik, writing in the introduction to a modern reprint of the first book of the series, "A London Child of the Seventies," called the first three books (generally considered as a trilogy) "the most perfect and moving record of [middle-class] life" in England during the period. He also noted that the author had had a bit of a hard life -- including the unexplained death of her father in a railway accident when she was ten; the death of her first child, a daughter, shortly after her first birthday; and the loss of her husband in similar fashion to her father's demise -- and "had written all three books as an old lady, living alone in the 1930s in a cottage in the suburbs [and yet she] had kept to the end all the clarity and mischief of a happy child." The author's Wikipedia entry describes the books as "a valuable source on women's education and women's work in the late Victorian period," singling this particular volume out for its "unparalleled portrait of life in a Victorian women's college." These much-loved books have been reprinted many times, but jacketed copies of the original editions are quite uncommon, especially in collectable condition -- but here's one! (In fact, it's actually a review copy, and has the original publisher's slip still affixed to the front pastedown.) .