The Novels of Jane Austen
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Collected critical edition of Jane Austen's novels, "with notes, indexes, and illustrations from contemporary sources," one of 1000 copies, a gift from Bloomsbury critic Lytton Strachey to novelist E.M. Forster. In an enthusiastic review, Forster declared: "this fine new edition has, among its other merits, the great merit of waking the Jane Austenite up. . . The novels continue to live their own wonderful internal life, but it has been freshened and enriched by contact with the life of facts. To promote this contact is the chief function of an editor, and Mr. Chapman fulfills it" (The New Republic, 30 January 1924). Forster notes, in particular, the illustrations "beyond all praise," drawn from the material record of Austen's own day, including architectural views, fashion plates, road maps, dancing manuals, and carriage catalogs; Mansfield Park opens with one of landscape gardener Humphry Repton's lift-up country-house views. In 1932, Chapman published a uniformly bound edition of Austen's letters, two volumes less warmly received by Forster: "they are the letters of Miss Austen, not of Jane Austen: and Miss Austen would think us silly to read them" (Times Literary Supplement, 10 November 1932). Forster's most famous tribute to Austen, of course, comes in Aspects of the Novel (1927): "All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity." His own fiction reflects her quiet humor and devastating social observation: A Room with a View rivals Pride and Prejudice as one of the most universally beloved modern romances. See Heffer's catalog of Forster's library, 1137. A near-fine set of the works of a major English novelist of the nineteenth century, from the library of a major English novelist of the next. Seven octavo volumes, measuring 9 x 7 inches. Original pale blue cloth spines, printed paper spine labels, blue marbled paper boards. Color pictorial frontispiece to each novel (one with moveable flap); folding map of London in Sense and Sensibility; folding maps of Steventon, Bath, and Hampshire in Letters, Volume I; folding facsimile of one of Austen's letters and folding maps of Chawton, English roads, and Kent in Letters, Volume II. Half-tone illustrations throughout text of all seven volumes; additional printed spine labels tipped into all. Ink presentation inscription from Lytton Strachey to E.M. Forster on front free endpaper of Sense and Sensibility; bookplate of E.M. Forster to front pastedown of same volume. Typed transcription of a nineteenth-century examination "set by Mr. Rose, rector of Weybridge, on Miss Austen's EMMA," laid into Emma. Spine labels and endpapers foxed, bindings lightly rubbed. Bookseller Inventory # 1002491
