Edith Olivier’s Owen, Inscribed by Sassoon
OWEN, Wilfred; Edmund Blunden (editor). The Poems of Wilfred Owen. A New Edition Including Many Pieces Now First Published, And Notices of his Life and Work. London: Chatto and Windus. 1931.
8vo. Original purple cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in the dust-jacket (printed in burgundy and black) priced 6s. net to the front flap; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 135, [1 (blank)]; photographic portrait frontispiece with tissue guard, fore- and tail-edges untrimmed; spine and upper edge sunned, slight soiling and rubbing to spine, a few marks to covers, some wear to spine ends and corners; else a very good copy in like wrapper; Siegfried Sassoon’s monogrammed presentation inscription to Edith Oliver to half-title, dated 21 March 1931; housed in a custom drop-back solander box of red quarter morocco with cloth sides, spine lettered directly in gilt.
Inscribed by Owen’s first editor and instigator of this edition, Siegfried Sassoon, to his friend, confidante, and matchmaker Edith Olivier (1872–1948).
Blunden’s extended edition of Owen’s poems appeared eleven years after the slimmer volume edited by Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell in 1920. A war veteran and distinguished poet himself, Blunden was urged to edit the volume by Sassoon, who was never pleased with the earlier edition. ‘[A] more experienced and exacting editor’ (Stallworthy), Blunden added thirty-seven poems to the twenty-three in the 1920 edition, as well as a memoir of Owen and notes to the poems. Like Sassoon and Sitwell, he reprints Owen’s short sketch for a preface, adding the poet’s own table of contents (‘with its perplexities’). The edition ‘helped to consolidate Owen’s reputation and elevate him to the iconic status he was to hold for poets and readers of poetry in the 1930s and after’ (Stallworthy); it was the volume that endeared Owen to Auden, and later Larkin.
The recipient of this copy, Edith Olivier, was founder of the Women’s Land Army (for which she was appointed MBE in 1920), and later mayor of Wilton from 1938 to 1941. Her duties as mayor included becoming president of the local St John Ambulance Brigade. She clearly had a talent for friendship, her friends including much of ‘the artistic circle of the day’ (ODNB), including Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, and William Walton. Olivier described Sassoon as ‘the best of friends’, his character ‘by turns violently intolerant, sympathetically appreciative, and savagely satirical. I suppose that everyone talks best in an intimate circle of friends, but this applies to Siegfried more than to anyone I know. When he does wake up and begin to talk, his conversation is very racy and amusing. He makes fun of himself as well as of other people and his descriptive powers are quite astonishing.’ (Without Knowing Mr Walkley) A trusted confidante, and a mediator between Sassoon and the larger-than-life figure of his lover, Stephen Tennant, she would also help facilitate the relationship between Sassoon and his wife Hester in 1933.
Olivier wrote novels, a biography of Alexander Cruden (1934), a book on Wiltshire, and her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr Walkley (1938), which remains in print. She died in 1948. ‘There was honour’, Cecil Beaton wrote of the mood at her funeral, ‘for what she had done; but there was love for what she was and is’ (Salisbury Journal).
White, p. 13; Kirkpatrick B47.
SKU: 2124414