MALORY, Thomas.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Story of Elayne. The Fair Maid of Astolat. A nicely printed extract from the Morte d'Arthur, in a binding hand-painted in the colours of the suffragette movement. Against wider arts and crafts engagement with amateur handiwork, painted bindings were predominantly the work of "women with some artistic talent who wished to decorate books" (Tidcombe, p. 83).Malory's romantic epic features five separate women of the same name; this extract relates to "the best known and most cited of these", Elaine Le Blank, "who falls in love with Lancelot, provokes Guinevere's jealousy, and eventually dies of love for the knight". The figure is particularly well known from Tennyson's Lady of Shalott (1832).

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