first edition Hardcover
1931 · Garden City NY
by Colette (translated from the French by Charlotte Remfry-Kidd)
Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1931. First American Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [minimal shelfwear, light dust-soiling/spotting to top edge; jacket browned/discolored/faded at spine, otherwise just lightly worn and quite attractive] Novel about "the darling of the Paris music halls," miserable in her marriage to an unfaithful fop of a husband, and her passionate love for "a big, simple, straightforward landholder from the provinces." (Ah, it's always the big, simple, straightforward ones, isn't it? Especially if they're landholders.) The novel, based on Colette's own experiences, was originally published as "La Vagabonde" in France in 1910, and was adapted into a 1918 silent film, "La Vagabonda." Critic James Hopkin celebrated the book's centenary in a rhapsodic 2011 article in The Guardian, praising its "energy and inventiveness" and calling it "a rousing novel of love and guile, of vulnerability and vituperative wit, of poetry and self-empowerment, a slim volume scored with little wisdoms, sumptuous descriptions and the 'heroic vanity' of an unforgettable cast." Jacketed copies of the original American editions of Colette's novels are all quite scarce. . (Inventory #: 20127)