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3 AUDEN, W. H. Nones. London: Faber and Faber, 1952 “STONES ENDURE AS YOUR FIRST AND LAST THINGS” First UK edition, first impression, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his fellow Oxford poet Elizabeth Jennings, whom he greatly inspired, “To Elizabeth Jennings from Wystan Auden”, his printed name on the title page struck through. This is a compelling association: the year following publication Jennings published her first book while working as a senior assistant of Oxford City Library; she would later observe “my influences had been Auden, Edwin Muir, and Robert Graves, and, of course, the great lyrical tradition since Shakespeare” (quoted in Couzyn, p. 100). “From Auden she learned the use of the surprising adjective and how to turn an abstract idea into a poetic image” (Greene, p. 32). Commemorating Auden’s death in 1973, Jennings wrote “Elegy for W. H. Auden”, alluding to Auden’s famous poem “In Praise of Limestone”, which first appeared in book form in this collection. Nones was first published in America the previous year and includes “Their Lonely Betters” (“We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep, words are for those with promises to keep”). Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. Front pastedown with stamp of Oxford bookseller. Spine faintly sunned, offsetting to free endpapers, contents clean. An excellent copy in very good dust jacket, not price-clipped, spine panel sunned, shallow chip at head, abrasion at foot of rear panel affecting a few letters, sharp and bright overall. ¶ Bloomfield and Mendelson A32b. Jeni Couzyn, ed., The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets , 1985; Dana Greene, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War , 2018. £1,250 [154883] 4 BAGNOLD, Enid. A Diary Without Dates; [together with] The Happy Foreigner. London: William Heinemann, 1918 & 1920 Her two wartime works, each inscribed to her friend and nursing colleague
Enid Bagnold’s two wartime works, each inscribed by her to Dorothy Heath, her friend and fellow First Aid Nursing Yeomanry driver, together with three letters and a postcard from Bagnold to Heath. A Diary Without Dates is inscribed on the dedication page verso, “To Dorothy Heath (who said ‘Did you write this?’ and changed my career in France) with love from Enid 1919”; The Happy Foreigner is inscribed on the front free endpaper, “To Dorothy – in memory of her paper cell at Ber-le-duc and in part payment for the bath she lent me and which I lost in the river. Enid Bagnold June 28. 1920”. A Diary Without Dates , Bagnold’s war memoir of her work as a VAD from 1914 to 1918, was published in January 1918, and this is a third impression, published two months later; The Happy Foreigner is a first edition. Though Bagnold received critical acclaim for A Diary Without Dates , she was expelled from her job after publication. She subsequently signed up to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and her experiences there formed the basis of her semi- autobiographical novella, The Happy Foreigner . Bagnold met Heath in France when she joined Unit 6 at Bar-le-Duc just after the Armistice in November 1918. There, they shared a makeshift hut on the brink of the river Meuse, where Bagnold presumably lost Heath’s bath. In the book, Bagnold describes their “paper cells”, which she referenced in the inscription: “A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on either hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey paper stretched upon laths of wood – making eight in all. At one end was a small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room. This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her intimate life . . . The daylight showed her nothing to wash in, no jug, no basin” (p. 10). Their friendship continued after the war, as evidenced by the accompanying three letters and postcard from Bagnold to Heath arranging lunches together. Bagnold’s most famous work, National Velvet , was published in 1935. 2 works, octavo. A Diary Without Dates : original green drab boards, spine and front cover lettered in black; The Happy Foreigner : original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Together with 3 letters and a postcard: 1) typed letter signed, undated, on headed paper, 13 Hyde Park Gardens; 2) autograph letter signed, dated 29 June, on headed paper, 13 Hyde Park Gardens (an
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