"The Oddness of the World"
WARNER, Sylvia Townsend. Mr Fortune's Maggot. London: Chattos and Windos. 1927.
8vo. Original patterned boards with gilt title lettering to spine; cream dust jacket with blue border; pp. [viii], 251, [1]; bookplate of owner to front pastedown; minimal foxing to preliminaries and all edges; slight toning to dust jacket spine; otherwise very good.
First edition, signed by the author on title page.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, contemporary of the likes of Djuna Barnes, contributed short stories to The New Yorker for 40 years and would go onto write six novels each subscribing to her mantra that all should depict; “the oddness of the world and the surprisingness of mankind”. Simultaneous to being a highly acclaimed author, she was also a talented translator, responsible for renditions of Proust’s Contre Saint-Beuve into English, as well as a noted biography of the novelist T.H. White and, alongside her life partner, the poet Valentine Ackland, she would become known as "The Leading Communist of Wessex". This miniature critique of Christian evangelism and the acts of the British empire seem eerily contemporary and Mr. Fortune's Maggot tells the tale of a banker who decides to become a missionary on an entirely remote island in the South Pacific, making one very meaningful convert.
Although her work was re-established in the 70's through the efforts of the seminal feminist press Virago, she remains a mysterious creative mind making this signed first edition scarce.
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