YEATS, W.B. The Land of Heart's Desire.

Beardsley & the Celtic Twilight

YEATS, W.B. The Land of Heart's Desire. Chicago: Stone & Kimball. 'MDCCCXIV' (but 1894).

Small 8vo. Original grey-green paper-covered boards, printed paper spine label; pp. [iv], 43, [3]; wood-engraved frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley, printer’s device to title in red; spine and extremities slightly rubbed, slight soiling to spine label, upper joint and front free endpaper sometime expertly restored; internally very good; bookplate of W. MacDonald Mackay to front pastedown.

First American edition, limited to 450 copies, of Yeats’s first play to be performed, printed by Harvard graduates Herbert Stone and Ingalls Kimball at their press in Chicago, instrumental in introducing Art Nouveau book and poster design to America.

The first English edition was published in April or May 1894, limited to 500 copies, and the present edition followed in late summer or early autumn of the same year. The Land of Heart’s Desire received its premiere at the Avenue Theatre in London on 29 March 1894, a joint production with A Comedy of Sighs by John Todhunter. Beardsley’s frontispiece – depicting a woman peering out from a semi-transparent curtain – was originally used for the poster advertising the two plays (Samuels Lasner 62), commissioned by the actress Florence Farr, a friend of Beardsley, who had urged Yeats to write the present work. One of the most enduring products of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight period, the play, written in blank verse, concerns a faery child who entices a newlywed Sligo woman to enter an underworld of myth and endless joy.

Provenance: front pastedown with bookplate of W. MacDonald MacKay (c. 1872–1952), Toronto book collector and historian of Scotland.

Gertner Zatlin 967; Samuels Lasner 62e, note; Wade 11; cf. Vallance 76.

SKU: 2124691