Anna Katharine. The Doctor, His Wife and The Clock.

by GREEN

£275 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

The Mother of American Mysteries GREEN, Anna Katharine. The Doctor, His Wife and The Clock. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1895. Tall 16mo. Publisher’s brown wrappers illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley and printed in red, printer’s device in black to rear cover; pp. [iv], 131, [1]; with 2 ff. plates comprising frontispiece repeating Beardsley’s illustration with facing architectural illustration, with tissue guard; lettering to spine faded, spine ends chipped, a few chips to upper cover; else a very good copy, uncut; nineteenth-century compliments slip of J.W. Wild loosely inserted. First edition of this detective story by the ‘mother of the American detective novel’, with wrappers and a frontispiece designed by Beardsley. Brooklyn-born Anna Katharine Green (1846–1945, here published under her married name, Rohlfs) was the author of The Leavenworth Case (1878), one of the earliest mysteries written by an American woman; the work received high praise from Wilkie Collins: ‘Her powers of invention are so remarkable – she has so much imagination and so much belief (a most important qualification for our art) in what she says … Dozens of times reading the story I have stopped to admire [Green’s] fertility of invention’. The Leavenworth Case introduced her detective protagonist, Ebenezer Gryce, who reappears here as the investigator of a seemingly unsolvable murder in nineteenth-century New York. Beardsley’s image is taken from the poster he designed to promote Fisher Unwin’s children’s boo

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.