[Rarebooks] fa: JUSTINE WYNNE, COUNTESS OF ROSENBERG - MORAL AND SENTIMENTAL ESSAYS 1785 (courtesan/lover of Casanova)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, May 31. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/mr3mju3

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

[Giustiniana (or Justine) Wynne, Countess Rosenberg-Orsini:] Moral and Sentimental Essays, on Miscellaneous Subjects, Written in Retirement, on the Banks of the Brenta, in the Venetian State. By J. W.  C-t-ss of R-s-g. In Two Volumes. London: Printed for J. Robson, New Bond-Street, MDCCLXXXV [1785]. FIRST EDITION. Two volumes, small 8vo (17 cm), in modern burgundy buckram with gilt-lettered spines; xiii, [3], 206 pp.; [4], 227, [1] pp. ESTC T96530.

Very scarce: ESTC locates only 2 copies in the U.S. (Princeton, Library Company of Philadelphia) and 3 in the UK (BL, Bodleian, University of Wales). Deaccessioned from the Peabody Institute Library of Baltimore, with relatively benign library markings: bookplate (stamped "Sold by Maryland Historical Society") on the verso of the vol. I title-page; title-pages with unobtrusive blind-stamps and ink numerals on the versos; spine of vol. I shows faint rubbing where shelving numbers once were. Vol. II lacking one leaf (pp. 13-14) which appears never to have been bound in; title-page of vol. I with browning, small chips to the edges, and a closed tear; contents toned, with occasional browning, spotting and stains, but generally clean.

Autobiographical collection of essays and reminiscences by this famous eighteenth-century courtesan and blue-stocking, novelist, salon doyenne, lover of Casanova, Andrea Memno and others. "Giustiniana Wynne, also known as Justine, was born in Venice, the daughter of a Protestant Englishman abroad and a Venetian woman of Greek origin… Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reported on the family history from Venice in 1758: 'He  was introduced by his Gondolier… to this Greek.. and had three daughters by her, before her artifices prevailed on him to marry her. The eldest daughter speaks English.' Giustiniana's earliest romantic entanglements involved Casanova, who wrote about her appreciatively in his memoirs under the name of Mlle. X.C.V…: 'Although she was only fifteen, she was a perfect beauty…' He made the conquest some years later, in Paris, when Wynne was already pregnant with someone else's child; Casanova persuaded her that sex with him [with saffron and honey smeared on his penis] would help bring about an abortion. [It didn't.]… In 1761 she married the Austrian ambassador in Venice, Count Philip Orsini-Rosenberg, then in his 60s… [who] conveniently left his wife a young widow in 1765… In Venice she held an enlightened salon… Casanova was also in Venice in the 1770s and was able to report in his memoirs on Wynne's respectable widowhood…" (Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment, 2001). Included are essays on music, gaming (Wynne was a notorious gambler), love, laughter, "a melancholy fit of morality," etc. (See also: Bruno Brunelli, Casanova Loved Her [Un' Amica del Casanova],1929).