Forbidden Love and Incestuous Insinuations?
‘DORNIS, Jean’ [pseud. Élena BEER].
La voie douloureuse. [Évreux, Charles Hérissey for] Paris, Calmann Levy, 1894.
8vo, pp. viii, 195, [1, blank]; a very good copy in contemporary red Jansenist morocco by E. Pouget (turn-in signed in gilt, front free endpaper verso signed in black), spine lettered directly in gilt, top-edge gilt, others trimmed, the original printed wrappers bound in; a little rubbed, partial split to front joint, wrappers lightly soiled; authorial ink presentation inscription to Edmond Beer to half-title (see below).
First edition of Jean Dornis’s first novel, presented by the author to her brother-in-law, Edmond Raphael Beer, one of twenty-four copies on papier de Hollande.
Jean Dornis was the pen-name of the Italian-born French author Élena Beer (née Goldschmidt-Franchetti, 1864–1949). Later instrumental in popularising Italian literature and theatre in France, she contributed to the Revue des deux mondes and Le Figaro, inter alia; La voie douloureuse is her first published work, a novel about a married woman, Jeanne, who falls in love with her brother-in-law, recently returned from Vietnam and engaged to her best friend. In what is perhaps a slightly eyebrow-raising gesture, our copy is presented by the author to her own brother-in-law, Edmond Raphael Beer (1857–1912): ‘A Edmond Beer | gage d’affetueuse sympathie’.
Provenance:
From the de Rothschild library at Exbury House, Hampshire, most likely by descent to Beer’s daughter, Marie-Louise (1892–1975), who in 1912 married Lionel Nathan de Rothschild. They acquired the Exbury estate (formerly in the possession of the Mitfords) in 1919.