KITCHIN, C. H. B.

£5,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Death of My Aunt. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To a triad of illustrious but over-critical uncles, Darcy, Arnold & Hugh Kitchin, from their Nephew Clifford H. B. Kitchin. September 1929". Copies in the dust jacket are rare even when unsigned, and we can trace no other inscribed copies in auction records.Kitchin's most popular work, Death of My Aunt launched the Malcolm Warren mystery series and was later followed by Death of His Uncle (1939). Kitchin sits alongside Vita Sackville-West and William Plomer as the three most published Hogarth Press novelists after Virginia Woolf herself. In the outer orbit of the Bloomsbury Group, Kitchin spoke autobiographically in Crime at Christmas (1935), "It is my fate, in Bloomsbury, to be thought a Philistine, while in other circles I am regarded as a dilettante with too keen an aesthetic sense to be a responsible person". He later reflected in a letter of 5 July 1965 that "Virginia Woolf, the most formidable of them all, developed, I think, a slightly protective attitude towards me and it was thanks to her good offices that the Hogarth Press published my first two novels, Streamers Waving and Mr Balcony" (quoted in Holroyd, p. 468). Kitchin's close friend L. P. Hartley remarked that he was "one of the cleverest, most intellectual, and most challenging of our novelists".The recipients were Darcy (1863-1939), Arnold (1871-1945), and Ernest Hugh Kitchin (1874-1935), the former of whom

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