55
56
erary career of her own. In what was a rare distinction for a woman at the time, du Boccage was awarded first prize at the Rouen Acad- emy in July 1746 for a poem comparing the advances in sciences to those in the arts. Voltaire’s response upon reading it was to call her the “Sappho of Normandy”. Her translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost was the most popular French version of the epic during the 18th century. She was the second Frenchwoman, after the mathemati- cian Emilie du Châtelet, to be admitted to the prestigious acade- mies of Rome and Bologna. Rasmussen, Dennis C., The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought , Princeton University Press, 2017. £1,250 [129431] 56 DUNBAR, Alice. The Goodness of Saint Rocque and other stories. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899 Small octavo. Original green cloth, title to spine and front cover in silver, illus- tration to spine and front cover blocked in black and silver designed by Thom- as Watson Ball. Some superficial silverfishing to spine, periphery of covers, and top edge, inner hinge cracked at title page (preliminary matter partially detached at gutter), remaining a bright, fresh copy of this scarce work. first edition of “the first collection of short stories by an African American woman to be published by a major national press” (Gow- dy, p. 226). Focused on the Creole milieu of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayous, this is the second of only two books by Alice Ruth Dunbar-Nelson ( née Moore, 1875–1935), African American poet, jour- nalist, political activist, to be published during her lifetime. Her first published work, Violets and other tales , a collection of prose and poetry published by the Boston Monthly Review in 1895, had caught the attention of the popular poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The two married in 1898, and “Dunbar’s celebrity influence helped Alice place her second book . . . with Dodd, Mead in New York. Many readers not aware of her earlier book wrongly credited her writing success entirely to her husband’s influence; however, notably absent from St. Rocque is the stereotyped black dialect that Dunbar, along with numerous white writers of the previous quarter century, had helped to popularize. Alice creates instead a group of characters who defy
the overworked racial caricatures so common in post-Civil War lit- erature” (ibid., pp. 226–7). The work is notably rare, institutionally OCLC traces one copy, in Germany at Universitatsbibliothek Eich- statt; additionally, we have traced just one example in an American institution (the Library of Congress copy, held at Howard University in Washington, DC). Just two copies appear on auction records, of which one is the Library of Congress duplicate copy. Dunbar-Nelson, born in New Orleans to Patricia White, a former slave, graduated in 1892 from Straight College (now Dillard Uni- versity) and began work as a teacher at New Orleans elementary school. She moved to Massachusetts in 1896, and by the following year was teaching in Brooklyn, New York. Dunbar-Nelson and her first husband separated in 1902, and she moved to Delaware, where she increased her political involvement, and became an outspoken champion for women’s suffrage and civil rights movements in the US. In 1916 she married Robert J. Nelson, a journalist, politician, and civil rights activist, and together they co-edited and published the Wilmington Advocate , a progressive African-American newspaper. In 1920 “Dunbar-Nelson was a member of the Delaware Republican State Committee, the first African-American woman to hold such a position. She was also a member of a committee that presented racial concerns to President Warren Harding at the White House in 1921. She defected to the Democrats in 1924 following the failure of the Republicans to act on the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Dunbar-Nel- son’s tireless work in the burgeoning African-American women’s club movement occupied a great deal of her time and energy and gained her notoriety. As a result of her involvement in the Dela- ware State Foundation, she was one of the founders of the Indus- trial School for Colored Girls in Marshalltown, Delaware, in 1920” ( ANB ). Her papers are today held at the University of Delaware, rep- resenting “one of the most extensive and important archives from an early African American woman writer”. Not in BAL. Gowdy, Anne Razey, “Alice Dunbar Nelson”, The History of Southern Women’s Literature, ed. by Carolyn Perry & Mary Weaks-Baxter, Louisiana State Uni- versity Press, 2002. £3,750 [131517]
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
29
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online