Violette of Père Lachaise (Presentation copy)

New York: Frederick A. Stokes and Company, 1915. First edition. Near Fine. Inscribed by the author on the front flyleaf: "Paula Woitke, From her friend Anna Strunsky Walling - New London, June 22, 1917." Publisher's burgundy cloth titled in gilt with violet design. [10], 3-198 pp. Exceptionally bright and fresh aside from some fading to spine. Some cracking to lower gutter at tail edge. Without the rare dust jacket. A Near Fine copy of an attractively designed and scarce book.

Anna Strunsky Walling (1877 - 1964) was a socialist writer and activist who campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty and was involved with the founding of the NAACP. Born in what is now Belarus to Jewish parents, Walling immigrated to New York with her family as a child. In 1893, the family relocated to San Francisco, and Walling enrolled in Stanford University a few years later. At Stanford, she became close friends with Jack London, with whom she co-authored the epistolary novel The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903). In 1906, Walling married her husband, William (1877 - 1936), who became one of the founding members of the NAACP in 1909.

The Violette of Père Lachaise is a socialist bildungsroman about a young woman who dedicates "herself to the revolutionary struggle, not as an act of self-abnegation or martyrdom but as 'the full flowering of her whole personality'" (Buhle). Walling imagines Violette, a talented actress who lives with her flower-seller grandfather on the edge of Père Lachaise cemetery, as a model for the socialist woman of the future: Violette is an unusually gifted artist, but her free thinking, creative personality represents Walling's ideal of a fully actualized individual. "In this way, Mrs. Walling, herself a prominent figure in the social revolution, embodies her conception of the modern philosophy of love and revolution, idealism and democracy. Violette is a forerunner of the future" (from the dust jacket).

Buhle 269. Near Fine.