The Little Lady of the Big House

$2,250 · Offered by Book Collector Inc

Author: John "Jack" Griffith London (1876-1916) Year: 1916 Publisher: MacMillan Company Place: New York Description: [vi]+392+[393-394]+[4 ad] pages with frontispiece in color. Small octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/4") bound in original publisher's blue cloth with lettering to front cover decoration with pictorial view of "The Big House" in cream and orange, a Spanish hacienda, Modeled on Mrs Phoebe Hearst's Hacienda del Pozo de Verona at Pleasanton, California. In foreground are black palm trees and light blue walk. e and gilt lettering to spine. In original pictorial jacket. ( BAL 11966; Sisson Martens, p. 87) First edition of which 18,448 copies were printed. The Little Lady of the Big House was his last novel to be published during London's lifetime.The story concerns a love triangle The protagonist, Dick Forrest, is a rancher with a poetic streak (his "acorn song" recalls London's play, The Acorn Planters ). His wife, Paula, is a vivacious, athletic, and sexually self-aware woman, who falls in love with Evan Graham, an old friend of her husband. Unable to choose between the two men, she wounds herself mortally with a rifle in what her husband is certain is a suicide. Biographer Clarice Stasz writes that the book is "not autobiography", but speaks of London's "frank borrowing from his life with Charmian", his second wife, and says it is "psychologically valid as a mirror of events during [the] winter [of 1912–13]". Paula, like Charmian, is subject to insomnia and is unable to bear c

• Binding: Hardcover

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