MILLER, Henry.

£4,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Tropic of Capricorn. First edition, first printing, first issue, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper prior to publication, "To Audrey Beecham, from her well wisher, Henry Miller, 1/5/39". Copies are rare inscribed. Beecham was a "poet and eccentric" (ODNB), and a descendent of Thomas Beecham, founder of the eponymous pharmaceuticals empire. Miller published several of her poems while editor at Delta magazine. She once took an extended holiday from her Oxford studies to run guns for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, and when she graduated in 1937, she moved to Paris, where she befriended Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell. In the 1940s, she spent much of her time in London, where she garnered a serious poetic reputation, and befriended Joe Ackerley and Dylan Thomas: "she prided herself on her mastery of martial arts and on her claim to have knocked out Dylan Thomas cold when he made unwelcome advances to her" (ibid.)To the surprise of her contemporaries, she applied for and was appointed the warden of Nightingale Hall, the women's residence at the University of Nottingham, in 1950. Lord David Cecil remarked on her unexpected appointment, "There's no martinet like a reformed rake" (ibid.) Pearson notes that publication of Tropic of Capricorn was initially scheduled for February 1939 but was delayed until 10 May 1939, "as a result of which few copies were sold before the beginning of the war, the death of Kahane, and the shutting down of the Obelisk Pr

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