THE DEDICATION COPY
Hudson River Bracketed
Appleton, 1929.
First edition, UK issue. Original blue pebble grained cloth lettered in gilt to spine and upper cover in supplied yellow printed dustwrapper. The dedication copy, inscribed by the author on the dedication page, under the printed dedication (To A.J.H.S.), "from E.W. / December 1929". A very good copy with the gilt dulled and the rear hinge tender, dustwrapper in very good condition indeed with minor wear to the edges and a slightly toned spine. Housed in a quarter leather clamshell box.
The dedicatee is John Hugh Smith, an American expatriate banker, art collector, francophile and literary devotee.
When in around 1904 Edith Wharton became friends with Henry James, she joined a group of men who became known as her "inner circle" or, sometimes, "the happy few". This group included men of letters, artists as well as business men such as Hugh Smith, and defined themselves against the society its founders had left in the United States, while simultaneously criticising and accommodating the one it found in Europe. It existed parallel to but also as a transatlantic mirror of the Bloomsbury group.
Stock ID: 23641
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