{"product_id":"farr-florence-the-dancing-faun","title":"FARR, Florence. The Dancing Faun.","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eSociety as Sham\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFARR, Florence.\u003c\/strong\u003e The Dancing Faun. \u003ci\u003eBoston: Roberts Brothers and London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane\u003c\/i\u003e. 1894.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFirst edition, published simultaneously in London and Boston as the second instalment of Elkin Mathews’ \u003ci\u003eKeynotes\u003c\/i\u003e series; \u003ci\u003eThe Dancing Faun\u003c\/i\u003e is the first book by the actress, director, composer, and suffragist Florence Farr, friend of both Wilde and Beardsley.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFarr 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Golden Stairs\u003c\/i\u003e (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 \u003ci\u003eSalomé\u003c\/i\u003e in England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShe 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Land of Heart’s Desire\u003c\/i\u003e (written at Farr’s request) and \u003ci\u003eA Comedy of Sighs\u003c\/i\u003e by John Todhunter on 29 March 1894. The faun to the frontispiece ‘has the eyeglass and features of J[ames] McNeill Whistler’ (Vallance).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFarr 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Dancing Faun\u003c\/i\u003e 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).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGertner Zatlin 826; Samuels Lasner 26; Vallance 69.ii; see Stetz and Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s (1990).\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2125387\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Henry Sotheran Limited","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":64326483083641,"sku":"2125387","price":500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2125387.jpg?v=1787325110","url":"https:\/\/sotherans.co.uk\/products\/farr-florence-the-dancing-faun","provider":"Sotherans","version":"1.0","type":"link"}