WAITE, Arthur Edward.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Belle and the Dragon. First edition, in bright condition, of this uncommonly found allegorical children's fantasy. The work, set in the mythic land of Ravendale, features lightly disguised versions of Waite and his cohort. In "all his work Waite presented himself as a non-denominational mystic", here named "the Mystic", and depicted at page 95 (ODNB).Waite's wife, Ada, is represented as the dormouse, while her sister, and Waite's first and true love, Dora, is featured as the heroine, Mesuline. Waite first met Dora in 1886 and the two fell almost immediately in love; however, in June 1887 she married one Reverend Granville Stuart-Menteath. In January 1888, Waite in turn married her sister Ada. Dora and Waite remained close despite their marriages and the two families lived near one another in Gunnersbury. Stuart-Menteath's sister, Evelyn, was also a close friend of Waite's and provided the striking illustrations for this work and several of his others, and features in the text as the title dragon. The title is a play on the deuterocanonical narrative of Bel and the Dragon in the extended Book of Daniel.A. E. Waite (1857-1942) was a poet and historian of occultism who "brought order out of the chaos of the occult revival and enabled the study of both the history and content of 'rejected knowledge' to become academically acceptable" (ibid.). Alongside his academic studies Waite wrote several collections of fantastical poetry with the 1890s being his "most prolific decade with te

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