EDDISON, E. R.

£5,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Mistress of Mistresses. A Vision of Zimiamvia. First edition, presentation issue, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Edward Crowe. From E.R.E. February, 1935", above Eddison's handwritten limitation statement, "In addition to the published edition, 12 copies of this book have been published on hand-made paper, of which this is No. 8".Loosely inserted is a 1970 autograph letter by the author's daughter, Jean Gudrun Rücker Latham. She explains that Sir Edward Crowe (1877-1960) was a lifelong friend of the Eddison family and Chief-Controller General during Eddison's tenure as Deputy-Controller General of the Department of Overseas Trade. Latham concludes, "I am so glad you have a vellum-bound copy of Mistress of Mistresses. My father was a great lover of beautiful things & he had your book & The Worm bound in vellum in limited numbers".Eddison (1882-1945) is widely regarded as one of the great writers of modern heroic fantasy. He left a lasting impression on Tolkien after reciting passages from the present work, which opens the "brilliant, complex, unfinished" Zimiamvian trilogy (Magill) and shares the world of The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Tolkien admired Eddison's writing for its "sheer literary merit" (Letters, p. 258) and shared C. S. Lewis's view that, in Eddison's stories, "every episode, every speech, helps to incarnate what the author is imagining. You could spare none of them" (Essays, p. 104).

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