GRAVES, Rosaleen.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Night Sounds and Other Poems. First edition, sole printing, inscribed by the author to her sister on the front blank, "Susan with love from Roz, 1923". Of the ten Graves siblings, Rosaleen was closest with her younger brother Robert, the war poet. As children they both contributed songs and stories to the house magazine begun by their mother, and Robert recalls "my best friend at that time was Rosaleen" (Graves, p. 57)."When Graves wrote the novel Antigua, Penny, Puce in 1936 and presented his portrait of a chuckle-headed brother in the web of a scheming, brilliant sister, he was drawing in part on the memory of his own resentful admiration for Rosaleen" (Seymour, pp. 17-18). Rosaleen also had experience of the First World War as a V.A.D. nurse, first in Kent and later at Wimereux, France, from 1917 to 1919. At least one of the poems makes direct reference to the war, "The Lucky Ones": ("'It's a long, long way,' was the song they were singing, / As they went swinging away with their load: / It was further than they guessed, but they trudged it like the rest, / And took their dreams, and left us, on the empty road...").

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