slipped into obscurity and poverty, and is considered her finest work. Upon its publication Rhys was awarded an Arts Council bursary, in addition to the W. H. Smith award. Octavo (197 × 125 mm). Bound by the publishers in full red morocco, turn- ins gilt, marbled endpapers. A touch of foxing to edges of book block. A near-fine copy, binding fresh and firm. £3,000 [157472] 101 RILKE, Rainer Maria. Autograph letter signed to Paul Thun-Hohenstein, one of the last to be written by the poet. Hôtel Bellevue Sierre (Valais), Switzerland: 4 November 1926 “How it breaks my heart not to be able to say to you: come!” An emotionally charged autograph letter signed from Rilke to his fellow Prague poet, the Austrian essayist and translator Count Paul Thun-Hohenstein (1884–1963). Rilke laments his inability to host his friend at Muzot due to a sudden sickness and divulges his desire to travel to the Mediterranean – content made poignant in light of the seriousness of his illness, which would lead to his death the following month. The present letter is one of the last to be written by the poet, who was hospitalised on 30 November at the Valmont Clinic in Glion near Montreux, and died of leukaemia on 29 December. Despite their correspondence stretching for over a decade, letters between Rilke and Thun number very few. In his concordance of their correspondence Klaus Jonas traces 11 known letters from Rilke to the Count (p. 274), of which this is the penultimate, postdated only by Rilke’s letter of 20 November 1926; of Thun’s responses only five are accounted for. Though Rilke and Thun first met in 1914, it was not until 1916 that they became closer friends, often running into one another while taking walks around Prague. It was Thun who introduced Rilke to Yvonne de Watteville, a young lady from one of the most distinguished patrician families in Bern who helped Rilke secure a Swiss residence permit – and thus enabled him to permanently move to his beloved Château de Muzot. It was at Muzot that Rilke spent his most creative periods, finishing the Duino Elegies and writing his Sonnets to Orpheus there – both considered the high points of his work. “In the fall of 1926, Thun was recuperating from a lung infection, spending several weeks on the Côte d’Azur in a little known idyllic place at the foot of the Maritime Alps at Cavalière. Returning from Provence to Vienna, he wrote to Rilke in order to announce his impending visit with him at Muzot . . . but not knowing whether or not Rilke would actually be at home, Thun wrote on an open postcard, in French, in order to enable Rilke’s housekeeper whom he suspected to be French-speaking . . . to answer him, poste restante, at Avignon. Upon his arrival there, Thun did indeed receive a reply, not from the housekeeper but from Rilke himself” (Jonas, p. 285) – this is that letter. Writing in French, Rilke exclaims, “How it breaks my heart not to be able to say to you: come! [ . . . ] but having fallen sick and not finding in my old tower (a little heroic) the necessary comforts for a sick person, I have, for the moment, closed Muzot. I am living in a wretched room in the Hotel Bellevue in Sierre, awaiting the proper time to be transferred either to the sanatorium at Val-Mont, or to any Swiss city where I would be better cared for. I regret this mischance very much; [ . . . ] They
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100 RHYS, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Andre Deutsch, 1966 rare Presentation copy of rhys’s maSTERPIECE, specially bound First edition, second impression, in a unique presentation binding, inscribed by the author on the presentation leaf, “Jean Rhys to Margaret Lane”, above the calligraphic presentation: “To Margaret Lane who kindly made the presentation to Jean Rhys, when, with this book, she won the W. H. Smith & Son £1000 Literary Award for 1965/66. December 13, 1967”. Copies of this titles signed or inscribed of Rhys’s masterpiece are notably rare; we have handled just one other inscribed copy. Margaret Lane (1907–1994) was a British journalist, biographer, and award-winning novelist, who worked as a special correspondent for the Express in New York where she landed an exclusive interview with Al Capone in 1932. On her return to England, she was the highest-paid woman journalist in the country, working for the Daily Mail from 1932 to 1938. She wrote well-regarded biographies of Charlotte Brontë, Samuel Johnson, and Beatrix Potter, and was president of the Women’s Press Club, the Dickens Fellowship, the Johnson Society, the Brontë Society, and the Jane Austen Society. Wide Sargasso Sea was conceived as a prequel to Jane Eyre . It was Rhys’s first novel since 1939, after several decades in which she
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