BALZAC, Honoré de; Ernest DOWSON (translator); Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). The Girl with the Golden Eyes (La Fille aux yeux d’or).

Retroactively Rectified Rivalry

BALZAC, Honoré de; Ernest DOWSON (translator); Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). The Girl with the Golden Eyes (La Fille aux yeux d’or). [London or New York?] Privately printed [for Herbert J. Williams]. [1929.]

8vo. Publisher’s yellow silk-backed boards with pink paper sides, printed paper spine label; pp. xi, [1 (blank)], 145, [3], including frontispiece; frontispiece, 7 wood-engraved plates , and in-text- illustrations by Beardsley; slight fading and a few small dampstains to boards, corners worn, very light wear to spine ends; but a very good copy.

Uncommon first edition thus of Ernest Dowson’s translation of Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes), with illustrations by Beardsley.

Dowson’s translation of Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) had first been published by Leonard Smithers in 1896 with illustrations by Charles Conder. Beardsley’s feelings of antipathy towards Conder (who once, at a party, publicly wiped the rim of his glass in a gesture of revulsion after Beardsley had accidentally drunk from it) ‘grew so strong that he was to refuse Smithers’ offer that he design the cover for The Girl with the Golden Eyes. It was done by Conder, and later reproduced in the fourth volume of The Savoy […] Beardsley’s developing dislike of Conder was probably the reason he was not asked to contribute more to The Savoy’ (Galbally, p. 143). This edition was privately published for Herbert J. Williams, editor and proprietor of the periodical The Critic, of which he appointed Dowson sub-editor in 1890. Eight of Beardsley’s drawings would appear in the article ‘Notes on the Literary Element in Beardsley’s Art’ by A.E. Gallatin, publishing ‘Katharina Klavsky, as Isolde’ for the first time.

OCLC finds four copies in the US (Stanford, South Carolina, Temple, Tulsa); no copies traced on Library Hub.

Not in Samuels Lasner. See Gertner Zatlin 1072; Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (2003).

SKU: 2126087