[Rarebooks] FS: Jewsbury: The Three Histories.

[Kaaterskill Books]

We are pleased to  offer:

Jewsbury, Maria Jane. THE THREE HISTORIES. THE HISTORY OF AN ENTHUSIAST. THE HISTORY OF A NONCHALANT. THE HISTORY OF A REALIST. Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1831. 268 pp. Sm. 8vo. Original quarter tan cloth over paper covered boards, paper spine label. First American edition. Rather uncommon.  Amer. Imprints 7747. Spine worn with tears along front joint, chips at head and heel, most of paper label rubbed way, boards rubbed, some soil spots, dampstain on preliminaries mainly through first page of text, scattered foxing, overall still a good copy.

First published the prior year in London, these three novellas mostly deal with the spiritual and emotional crisis Maria Jane Jewsbury (1800–1833) experienced as a woman author in the 19th century. "The possible emotional cost of the famous woman writer's life is expressed through the experiences of Julia Osborne, the protagonist of Jewsbury's novella ‘The History of an Enthusiast’, who achieves celebrity but comes to feel enervated, as well as distraught at failing to gain the man she loves. This story, which is one of many nineteenth- century texts indebted to Madame de Staël's novel Corinne (1807), treats sympathetically Julia's struggles to gain an education and to write in the face of family and social prejudice, but seems to portray her ambitions as ultimately misguided. The disjunctions in the text show how Jewsbury's experience of Hemans [a friend], her reading of Corinne, and her partial internalization of her culture's attitudes to women writers, are in conflict with her own persisting ambitions and her belief in women's intellectual capacities: another novella, ‘The History of a Nonchalant’, confronts, and then backs away from, its protagonist's struggle with religious doubt," (Joanne Wilkes in ODNB).  [40974] $200.00*


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Charles Kutcher
Kaaterskill Books
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