[Rarebooks] fa: LETTERS & WORKS OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU - 3 vols./Riviere Bindings - 1837

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, September, 23. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y83us2aq

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Edited by her great grandson Lord Wharncliffe. London: Richard Bentley, 1837. First edition thus. Three volumes, 8vo (21.5 cm), bound by Rivière & Son in three-quarter crimson polished calf with gilt-tooled spines, marbled endpapers, top page edges gilt; [4], lxiv, 424, [1] pp.; [4], 425, [1] pp.; [4], 467, [1] pp.; with the half-title pages; frontispiece in each volume, plus several portraits.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was one of the most remarkable women of her time: poet, essayist, wit, peripatetic traveler, prolific letter writer, proto-feminist. With her husband, the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, she lived and traveled in Turkey, where she observed the practice of smallpox inoculation and was the first to introduce it to Western medicine; without her husband, she traveled and resided in many other places, including the south of France, Italy, and Switzerland. Her letters, particularly those written in the East, are what she is principally remembered for. Her embassy letters have been described as "the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient" (Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918).

From the library of Philip Sassoon, early twentieth-century aesthete, social host, and art and book collector, with his engraved bookplates on the front paste-down of each volume. Bindings with some rubbing and wear to the corners and spines; contents with occasional mild browning and scattered small spots, a few light blind stamps, else clean and sound, firmly and handsomely bound.