ASSOCIATION COPY
BEERBOHM, Max.
Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story.
London, William Heinemann, 1911.
8vo, pp. [8], 350, [2, imprint, blank]; title and half-title printed in brown and black; a very good copy in publisher’s brown cloth, panelled in blind, spine lettered in gilt; corners and endcaps slightly bumped, some toning to endpapers; bookplate ‘Ex Libris Mary Hunter, Hill Hall, Theydon Mount’ to front pastedown (see below).
First edition of Beerbohm’s only novel, an Oxford Eights Week satire in which the effect of one woman’s beauty on the entire undergraduate population proves comically fatal, in the scarcer variant binding of decorated cloth.
Celebrated essayist and caricaturist Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872–1956) matriculated at Merton, Oxford in 1890 where he became involved with the circle of fin-de-siècle artists including Oscar Wilde. A famous society spectator, Beerbohm drew caricatures of many of the artists associated with The Yellow Book, and both his satire and celebrity extended to his writing. E.M. Forster pronounced Zuleika Dobson ‘the most consistent achievement of fantasy of our time’ (Aspects of the Novel, 1927).
Provenance: Mary Hunter (née Smyth, 1857–1933), known for her artistic and literary patronage, was a close friend of and subject for John Singer Sargent, in turn a subject of Beerbohm’s caricatures. Hunter’s correspondence with Beerbohm is held by the Beinecke (OSB MSS 186).
