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Jane Austen; R.W. Chapman (editor); [E.M. Forster]; [Lytton Strachey].
The Novels of Jane Austen; with: Jane Austen’s Letters to Her Sister Cassandra
and Others.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923-1932. Seven octavo volumes, original
marbled boards. Color pictorial frontispieces, illustrations and folding maps throughout
text. Inscribed by Lytton Strachey to E.M. Forster, with Forster’s bookplate. $9500.
Collected critical edition of Jane Austen’s novels, “with notes, indexes, and
illustrations from contemporary sources,” one of 1000 copies, a gift from
Bloomsbury critic Lytton Strachey to novelist E.M. Forster.
In an enthusiastic review, Forster declared: “this fine new edition has, among its
other merits, the great merit of waking the Jane Austenite up….The novels
continue to live their own wonderful internal life, but it has been freshened and
enriched by contact with the life of facts. To promote this contact is the chief
function of an editor, and Mr. Chapman fulfills it.” Forster notes, in particular, the
illustrations “beyond all praise,” drawn from the material record of Austen’s own
day, including architectural views, fashion plates, road maps, dancing manuals, and
carriage catalogs;
Mansfield Park
opens with one of landscape gardener Humphry
Repton’s lift-up country-house views. In 1932, Chapman published a uniformly
bound edition of Austen’s letters in two volumes, less warmly received by Forster:
“they are the letters of Miss Austen, not of Jane Austen: and Miss Austen would
think us silly to read them.”
Forster’s most famous tribute to Austen, of course, comes in
Aspects of the Novel
(1927): “All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity.” His own fiction
reflects her quiet humor and devastating social observation:
ARoom with a View
stands alongside
Pride and Prejudice
as one of the most universally beloved modern
romances. See Heffer’s catalog of Forster’s library, 1137. A near-fine set of the works
of a major English novelist of the nineteenth century, from the library of a major
English novelist of the next.
