[Rarebooks] fa: LADY CHARLOTTE BURY - ALLA GIORNATA or TO THE DAY - 1826 (3-volume novel in Original Boards)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, November 9. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/mc3n2m6

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


[Lady Charlotte Susan Maria Bury:] “Alla Giornata;” or, To the Day. London: Saunders and Otley, 1826. FIRST EDITION. Three volumes, 8vo, original publisher's boards with printed spine labels; modern cloth drop-back box with gilt-lettered morocco spine label; with the publisher's adverts and half-titles. Sadleir 470; Wolff 1008.

Some bumping to the corners, wear and darkening to the spines, chipping to the spine labels, two spines. with some loss at the foot; hinges cracked but holding; original/early owner's signature on upper covers; contents very good or better: light dust-soling to the top of the text block, a very few occasional small spots, otherwise clean and fresh, untrimmed as issued.

The third novel by Lady Bury, one of the foremost of the "silver fork" school of novelists. While the reviewer of La Belle Assemblée enthused that "richness of fancy and elegance of mind indicate the superiority of the work, and of its author," the Monthly Review's critic gives us a livelier and somewhat more ironical picture of the contents: "To the patrons and patronesses of the circulating libraries, it must have proved a complete ‘God-send,’ for it is composed precisely of those materials which fill their thirsty souls with never-ending wonder and delight. Italian banditti, monks, nuns, pilgrims, condottieri, witches, minstrels, nurses, love and slaughter, caverns, castles, sieges, battles, tempests, shipwrecks, all things in short that can darken or illumine the picture, that can impart to it terror or smiles, are to be found revelling in the hey-day of their glory in ‘Alla Giornata.’ The fair and noble author has squandered as much imagination upon these three volumes, as would in more economical hands have easily given life to a hundred. Every chapter in itself a surprising story, and might, with due management, be spun out into a separate work; —a labour which would be the less difficult, as her ladyship seems to have looked down with aristocratic disdain upon the mean artifices of connection and probability…"