WHARTON, Edith.

£1,800 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Mother's Recompense. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to her closest companion in later life, Robert Norton, on the front free endpaper, "R.N. from E.W., May 4 1925", with Norton's armorial bookplate.After making a small fortune in London, Norton (1868-1939) retired from business to devote himself to watercolour painting. He and Wharton first met in 1904, but "their intimacy took on a new dimension after the First World War" (Goodman, p. 24), around the time Wharton took up residence at Sainte-Claire in the south of France. Norton "was associated from the first with the discovery and invention of Sainte-Claire, and the whole story of the place was threaded through, to the end, with the pleasant amenity of his presence" (Lubbock, p. 178).Norton spent whole winters and summers at Sainte-Claire, and he and Wharton lived closely together there. "Each worked through the morning, she writing and he sketching. Afternoons tended to include a picnic... Following a typical lunch of eggs, cheese, olives, chicken, salads, chocolate, oranges, and coffee, they would take a long walk until teatime. In the evenings, he frequently read aloud from Hardy's The Return of the Native or Austen's Sense and Sensibility, to name two favourites" (Goodman, p. 24). Together, they co-edited the anthology Eternal Passion in English Poetry, "the first attempt to gather between two covers a selection of the most beautiful of English love poems", published by Appleton in 1939, tw

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