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23 BISHOP, Elizabeth. Geography III. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976 Octavo. Original brown cloth boards, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jack- et. Small chip to tail of the jacket, otherwise a fine copy. first edition, inscribed by the author on the title page, “Sister Lynn Conroy—all best wishes—Elizabeth Bishop, February 1st, 1978”, with the recipient’s blind stamp to the first page. Lynn Conroy was a poet and teacher who graduated as an English ma- jor from Catholic liberal arts college Seton Hill, Pennsylvania. She taught in Duquesne, Indiana, and Washington, DC, before return- ing to Seton Hill to teach English and creative writing. Geography III includes such classic poems as “One Art” (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”) and “The Moose”. £2,750 [124937] 24 BLACKWELL, Elizabeth. The Laws of Life, With Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1859 Octavo. Original reddish-brown morocco-grained cloth, spine lettered in rustic font in gilt, blind-stamped geometric panelling to boards, light brown coated endpapers, edges uncut. With the 4 pp. publisher’s advertisements at the rear. Yellow paper advertisement clipped and pasted to front free endpaper, contemporary ownership inscription, “MAB 1859” to front free endpaper with some light offsetting to pastedown, binder’s ticket to rear pastedown. Spine ends bruised and extremities just a little rubbed, book block and contents occasionally faintly foxed, some small chips and nicks to leaf edges, else a very good copy in unrestored contemporary condition. first uk edition of the British physician’s first published work: a collection of her popular lectures, delivered in New York during the spring of 1852, on the topics of moral and physical education of girls. First published in the US that year, the London edition includes additional prefatory comments addressed “To English Women”. The first US edition is quite common institutionally, but the present edition is far scarcer, OCLC tracing just nine copies.
Blackwell (1821–1910) overcame remarkable adversity to become the first woman to graduate MD—and above all the 150 male stu- dents in her cohort—from an American college in January 1849, an event that received widespread international press coverage. She then went to Paris, where she enrolled at La Maternité, the leading school for midwives, having been refused admittance as a doctor by all other Parisian hospitals, and later to London. There her ac- ceptance at St Bartholomew’s Hospital made her the first woman to practise as a doctor in Britain and, subsequently, the first woman to be admitted to the General Medical Council’s register (1859). Dur- ing the 1850s she returned to America where she set up the private practice which would eventually become the New York Infirmary for Women: a hospital run by women for women. £4,500 [123303] 25 BLAVATSKY, Helena Petrovna. Signed cabinet portrait photograph. London: Enrico Resta, [1889] Original albumen print mounted on grey heavy card stock studio mount printed in dark grey (image: 140 × 103 mm; mount: 162 × 109 mm). Slight rounding of mount corners, a couple of faint marks to photo edge; else a near-fine example. A signed cabinet photo of renowned occultist and founder of the- osophy Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891). This photo, often referred to as the “Sphinx” portrait, shows Blavatsky in her most common pose, with her head resting on her hand gazing directly to the viewer. It was one of six portrait photos she had done on 8 January 1889, at Resta’s studio at 4 Coburg Place, Bayswater. Blavatsky was pleased with the resultant photos and ordered a number of copies, especially of this shot, her favourite of the six. Resta (1858/9–1942) later donated the six original glass plates to the Theosophical So- ciety. Signed photos of Blavatsky are notably uncommon, with no other examples traced in commerce. Blavatsky moved to America in 1873, where she befriended Henry Steel Olcott, and came to prominence as a spirit medium. In 1875 Blavatsky, with the support of Olcott and William Quan Judge, founded the Theosophical Society, an organisation designed to
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