FIRST EDITION, FIRST IMPRESSION, PRESENTATION COPY inscribed on front endpaper by the author to Dr. Mabel Ulrich: ”For Mabel Ulrich/ With all my love/ from Storm Jameson”. Crown 8vo, pp. 312. Navy cloth, gilt-stamped lettering to spine, blind ruled with small gilt-stamped star to upper board. Slight cocking to spine, extremities lightly rubbed, faint stain to fore-edge of bottom board. Offsetting to endpapers, else pleasingly clean and bright. A near fine copy.
Over the last two decades scholars have re-evaluated the Whitby-born socialist, feminist and pacifist author’s role in the British literary scene, as well as questioning her self-proclaimed designation as ‘middlebrow,’ instead exploring her experiments with literary form (see, for instance, Birkett & Briganti, 2007; Gerrard, 2010). In this, Jameson’s first novel to engage with Europe and its recent history – her project in the Mirror of Darkness trilogy and the rest of her writing life – Farewell to Youth is a ‘hinge’ novel, not only in subject matter, but in relation to her own life too: during the same period, she moved back to Whitby from London and left her role as Knopf to survive – precariously – via
pen alone. Her semi-autobiographical novel, which she described as ‘shocking’ (referring both to its setting of the Great War and the protagonist’s extra-marital affair), was critically well-received. Like Jameson, the little-known Dr. Mabel Ulrich had a rich public life, as well as a diverse career that traversed medical and literary milieux: she was physician, health lecturer, critic and bookshop owner. A Minnesotan Sanger, she pioneered frank sexual education for (white, middle-class) American women and girls during WWI, via pamphlets such as Mothers of America and For a New World: The Girl’s Part; she ran a chain of book and print shops in Minnesota, as well as becoming a long-standing contributor to The Saturday Review. On the heels of Jameson’s dedication, Ulrich commissioned the Yorkshire writer to contribute a piece to her 1932 edited collection, The More I see of Men (Harper & Brothers)/ Man, Proud Man (Hamish Hamilton) (see our copy of the US edition). A near fine copy that gives some flesh to the otherwise little-known relationship between Jameson and Ulrich.

[ref: 1080 ] £160