FARR, Florence. The Dancing Faun.

Society as Sham

FARR, Florence. The Dancing Faun. Boston: Roberts Brothers and London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane. 1894.

8vo. Publisher’s light blue cloth, spine lettered directly in gilt, upper board illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley and lettered in teal; pp. 169, [1 (blank)], [4 (advertisements)], lithographic title-page illustrated by Beardsley; spine ends and corners lightly bumped, spine lightly sunned, a few small flecks to boards, hinges cracked; front free endpaper excised; half-title inscribed ‘Martha ?Chaites Waters | from her cousin Clara’, dated 26 May 1911, occasional underlining in pencil.

First edition, published simultaneously in London and Boston as the second instalment of Elkin Mathews’ Keynotes series; The Dancing Faun is the first book by the actress, director, composer, and suffragist Florence Farr, friend of both Wilde and Beardsley.

Farr studied at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and was a childhood friend of May Morris; at the age of nineteen, she posed with Morris and other friends for Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (now at the Tate Britain). She subsequently studied at Queen’s College, the first British educational institution to grant women academic qualifications, and turned to acting; Farr wrote extensively on the ‘New Woman’ and on women’s rights, was a close friend and collaborator of both Yeats and Shaw, and was instrumental in establishing the New Stage Club, which staged the first performance of Wilde’s Salomé in England.

She was also a friend of Beardsley, from whom she commissioned a poster for her first directorial project at the Avenue Theatre on the Embankment, a joint production of Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire (written at Farr’s request) and A Comedy of Sighs by John Todhunter on 29 March 1894. The faun to the frontispiece ‘has the eyeglass and features of J[ames] McNeill Whistler’ (Vallance).

Farr was ‘a writer with a gift for witty, epigrammatic dialogue in the Oscar Wildean mode. Set in the world of actors and social poseurs with which Farr was personally familiar, The Dancing Faun brilliantly illustrated the proposition that society itself was the greatest of stages – a realm composed entirely of “sham” in which, as the character noted, one’s only consolation was to recognise “that you would shudder a good deal more if you for one moment saw the truths which underlie these shams.”’ (Stetz and Samuels Lasner, p.42).

Gertner Zatlin 826; Samuels Lasner 26; Vallance 69.ii; see Stetz and Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s (1990).

SKU: 2125387