DESHOULIÈRES, Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde. Poësies.

£2,250 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd · No longer available

A Widow’s Unused Sheets DESHOULIÈRES, Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde. Poësies. Paris: Jean Villette. 1691. 8vo in 4s. Eighteenth-century speckled calf, edges speckled red and green, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, board-edges roll-tooled in gilt; Villette’s woodcut monogram device to title, woodcut and typographic headpieces; upper hinge cracked, small abrasions and short splits to joints subtly restored, sporadic light foxing, slight dust-soiling at foot of last 2 ff.; cancelled 1773 ownership inscription ‘de la bibliothèque de Philippe-René ?Prevel’ to front free endpaper, late eighteenth-century ownership inscriptions ‘Ex libris Brelay’ to title and p. 220, Brelay’s printed ownership slip pasted to title ( see below ); a very good copy. Extremely rare reissue reusing the sheets of the first edition of 1688 – printed by Françoise Loir, widow of the printer Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy – of the poems of Antoinette Deshoulières ( c . 1634-1694), published to coincide with the reading of Deshoulières’s work at the Académie française in the spring of 1691, our copy owned by a resident of Niort during the French Revolution. Voltaire called Deshoulières the most successful of French female poets, as ‘her verses have been the most widely remembered’ (quoted in Nouvelle biographie universelle XIII, col. 828, trans .). She was named a member of the Paduan Accademia degli Ricovrati and of the Academy of Aries, and in 1688 she received a pension of 2000 livres

• Binding: Hardcover

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