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133 SHELLEY, Mary. Autograph letter signed to her publishers. October 1843 “Gentlemen ... You would greatly oblige me ...” An unpublished autograph letter from Mary Shelley to the publishers Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans. Dated October 1843, White Cottage, Putney, where she had moved the previous month, she requests some specific volumes from Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia , a project to which she had contributed a few years prior. This letter was recently extracted from a volume and so was not known to the editors of her correspondence. Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia was a mammoth 133-volume publication, published between 1829 and 1846, to which many eminent figures of the day, including Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Moore, contributed. Shelley, who contributed to Italian Lives (1835); Spanish and Portuguese Live s (1837); and French Lives (1839), was the only woman among the 38 acknowledged contributors. Single sheet (179 × 114 mm), written on one side, and mounted (274 × 202 mm). In excellent condition. £5,000 [146431] 134 SHEPHERD, Nan. In the Cairngorms. Edinburgh & London: The Moray Press, 1934 the Pioneering Scottish Mountaineer and Poet First edition, first impression, a lovely copy in the scarce jacket, of Shepherd’s sole volume of poetry, a meditation on her beloved Cairngorms, and the last of her works published before a 40-year hiatus and the publication of The Living Mountain .
Shepherd (1893–1981) has posthumously been recognized as one of Britain’s finest writers on the natural world and is cited as a key influence by writers such as Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. She published three novels in a burst of creativity between 1928 and 1933 before the publication of this volume. Octavo. Original light brown cloth-backed boards, rounded spine lettered in gilt, pale brown patterned sides, top edge blue, others untrimmed. With dust jacket. Slight shelf wear, very light offsetting to endpapers, edges faintly foxed, a near-fine copy in like jacket, price- clipped, tiny chip to foot of spine, extremities a little rubbed. £2,500 [153570] 135 SILKO, Leslie Marmon. Laguna Woman. Greenfield Centre, New York: The Greenfield Review Press, 1974 First edition, first printing, of the author’s first book. Silko (b. 1948) is a key figure in the Native American literary and artistic renaissance, which began in the late 1960s. She is of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and Anglo-American heritage, and her mixed ancestry informs her work. Silko grew up on the edge of the Laguna Pueblo reservation. She deepened her affiliation to her tribe by drawing on their myths and storytelling practices in her work, and focussing on the importance of native traditions and community for Native Americans when faced with the alienation of existing in a white society. Octavo. Original wire-stitched wrappers lettered in black, illustration by the author on front wrapper in black. Black and white illustrations throughout, that on p. 5 by author, all others by Aaron Yava. Lightly toned and creased, a few marks to wrappers with remnants of sticker to head of rear, a very good copy indeed. £500 [161887]
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132 SHEIL, Mary Leonora, Lady. Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia. London: John Murray, 1856 a timely political account of qajar persia
First and only contemporary edition of the “first travel book on Persia by a woman” (Nash, p. 114), with additional comments from her husband, published during the Anglo-Persian War of 1856 to 1857. This is an unusually well-preserved copy in the desirable original cloth. Mary Anne Leonora Woulfe (1825–69) married Captain Justin Sheil (1803–1871), an Indian Army officer, in 1849 and travelled to Tehran with him, where Captain Sheil served as British envoy and minister at the shah’s court, their route passing through Poland, Russia and Circassia, a journey of some three months. She provides an engaging and detailed account from the point of view of a well-informed and inquisitive woman of political events in Tehran, at that time one of the major diplomatic hotspots in the Great Game. The book contains one of the earliest accounts of the acute civil unrest in Qajar Persia, following the many confrontations between the recently formed Babi movement and the Shi’a clerical establishment. Octavo. Original moderate green morocco-grain cloth, spine lettered in gilt, ornamental blind panels to covers, oval Persian-style device gilt to front cover, brown surface-paper endpapers. Engraved frontispiece, 6 similar plates with tissue guards. Some marginal notes in pencil throughout. Slight lean of spine, extremities with a touch of rubbing, book block cracked prior to gathering K, two small areas of offsetting from pressed flower. A very good copy, bright and square. ¶ Keighren, Withers, & Bell 230; Wilson, p. 208. Geoffrey P. Nash, Travellers to the Middle East from Burckhardt to Thesiger , 2011; Jane Robinson, Wayward Women , 1990; John Theakstone, An Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Women Travellers , 2017; Denis Wright, The English Amongst the Persians , 2001. £3,500 [156235]
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All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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