Florence. The Dancing Faun.

by FARR

£500 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

Society as Sham FARR, Florence. The Dancing Faun. Boston: Roberts Brothers and London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane . 1894. 8vo. Publisher’s light blue cloth, spine lettered directly in gilt, upper board illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley and lettered in teal; pp. 169, [1 (blank)], [4 (advertisements)], lithographic title-page illustrated by Beardsley; spine ends and corners lightly bumped, spine lightly sunned, a few small flecks to boards, hinges cracked; front free endpaper excised; half-title inscribed ‘Martha ?Chaites Waters | from her cousin Clara’, dated 26 May 1911, occasional underlining in pencil. First edition, published simultaneously in London and Boston as the second instalment of Elkin Mathews’ Keynotes series; The Dancing Faun is the first book by the actress, director, composer, and suffragist Florence Farr, friend of both Wilde and Beardsley. Farr studied at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and was a childhood friend of May Morris; at the age of nineteen, she posed with Morris and other friends for Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (now at the Tate Britain). She subsequently studied at Queen’s College, the first British educational institution to grant women academic qualifications, and turned to acting; Farr wrote extensively on the ‘New Woman’ and on women’s rights, was a close friend and collaborator of both Yeats and Shaw, and was instrumental in establishing the New Stage Club, which staged the first performance of Wilde’s Salomé in England. She was also a friend o

• Binding: Hardcover

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