The Aunt's Story (First Edition)
WHITE, Patrick. The Aunt's Story: A Novel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948.
Crown Octavo. Original navy blue cloth. Spine lettered in gilt. Original price-clipped dust jacket, with cover art reproducing Roy de Maistre's 1945 painting Figure in Garden (The Aunt). [vi], 346 pp. First edition, UK issue. Bookseller's stamp of the Grahame Book Company to front free endpaper. Bibliographic reference: Hubber & Smith E2.
Patrick White (1912–1990) conceived the idea for The Aunt's Story in the mid-1930s, before he had written any of his published novels, setting aside embryonic notes for the project to complete Happy Valley and The Living and the Dead. The war intervened, and it was not until January 1946, while White was still in London in the disordered aftermath of his wartime service, that the novel found its way back to him — through a painting. Roy de Maistre, White's close friend, former lover, and self-described "aesthetic mentor," had produced a work titled Figure in Garden (The Aunt), painted after visiting the site where a relative of his had been killed by a V-weapon late in the war: on a heap of rubble he found a photograph of the dead woman's mother, and from this grim souvenir painted a figure in full Edwardian dress with a face rendered entirely blank, as though her clothes hung on a tailor's dummy. White purchased the painting on the spot. The image fused in his mind with a long-planned novel about a wandering spinster going mad in a world on the brink of violence, and within a month of his demobilisation he was at work on the book that became The Aunt's Story — written during his final months in Europe and across the voyage back to Australia in 1946–47.
This first UK edition, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in September 1948, was the first of White's books to carry a de Maistre design on its dust jacket — though the connection between the two men long predated it: White's first novel, Happy Valley (1939), had been dedicated to de Maistre, whom White had met in 1936 and who remained, across three decades, the single most significant artistic influence on his development as a writer. The Routledge jacket, more modestly produced than its American Viking counterpart owing to continuing postwar paper and printing shortages, nonetheless reproduces de Maistre's painting directly — making this the edition in which the image that catalysed the novel's completion appears, appropriately, on its own cover.
The novel follows Theodora Goodman, an unmarried, overlooked woman in early middle age who, following the death of her domineering mother, leaves the constraints of her conventional Australian life for an increasingly dislocated journey through Europe and America — a journey in which the boundary between reality and delusion progressively dissolves, and which culminates in a quest for a kind of inner peace that borders on, and may in fact constitute, madness. Contemporary critical response divided sharply along geographical lines: American reviewers greeted the novel as evidence of a serious literary artist's arrival, while the British and Australian reception was considerably more muted — James Stern in the New York Times called it "brilliant, original and highly intelligent," while the Sydney Morning Herald's reviewer conceded its polish while warning it was "a book for highbrows." Viking sold 6,000 copies in the United States within a month of publication, necessitating a second printing; Routledge, by contrast, struggled to move its print run of 4,000 in the UK and Commonwealth market, ultimately remaindering 1,500 copies and subsequently dropping White from their list entirely.
Despite — or perhaps because of — its difficult and demanding reception, The Aunt's Story has come to be regarded by many critics as White's finest achievement: a work of extraordinary linguistic density and modernist ambition, structurally and stylistically indebted to Virginia Woolf, that pushed Australian literature decisively toward the international literary stage and helped clear the path for the more assertively Australian fiction that followed in the second half of the twentieth century. White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the first and to date only Australian to receive the honour, and The Aunt's Story is now widely read as the novel in which his mature voice first fully emerged.
Very good. Dust jacket price-clipped, in somewhat damaged condition: chipping and loss to creases, with numerous tape repairs made previously. Binding sturdy and tight, but some markings and delamination present on front board. Endpapers foxed. Contents otherwise very good, largely clear of markings. Bookseller's stamp for the Grahame Book Company to front free endpaper.
This book is currently on display in the rare book section of our Leichhardt store.
If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]
Catalogue Number: HH000153
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Description
WHITE, Patrick. The Aunt's Story: A Novel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948.
Crown Octavo. Original navy blue cloth. Spine lettered in gilt. Original price-clipped dust jacket, with cover art reproducing Roy de Maistre's 1945 painting Figure in Garden (The Aunt). [vi], 346 pp. First edition, UK issue. Bookseller's stamp of the Grahame Book Company to front free endpaper. Bibliographic reference: Hubber & Smith E2.
Patrick White (1912–1990) conceived the idea for The Aunt's Story in the mid-1930s, before he had written any of his published novels, setting aside embryonic notes for the project to complete Happy Valley and The Living and the Dead. The war intervened, and it was not until January 1946, while White was still in London in the disordered aftermath of his wartime service, that the novel found its way back to him — through a painting. Roy de Maistre, White's close friend, former lover, and self-described "aesthetic mentor," had produced a work titled Figure in Garden (The Aunt), painted after visiting the site where a relative of his had been killed by a V-weapon late in the war: on a heap of rubble he found a photograph of the dead woman's mother, and from this grim souvenir painted a figure in full Edwardian dress with a face rendered entirely blank, as though her clothes hung on a tailor's dummy. White purchased the painting on the spot. The image fused in his mind with a long-planned novel about a wandering spinster going mad in a world on the brink of violence, and within a month of his demobilisation he was at work on the book that became The Aunt's Story — written during his final months in Europe and across the voyage back to Australia in 1946–47.
This first UK edition, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in September 1948, was the first of White's books to carry a de Maistre design on its dust jacket — though the connection between the two men long predated it: White's first novel, Happy Valley (1939), had been dedicated to de Maistre, whom White had met in 1936 and who remained, across three decades, the single most significant artistic influence on his development as a writer. The Routledge jacket, more modestly produced than its American Viking counterpart owing to continuing postwar paper and printing shortages, nonetheless reproduces de Maistre's painting directly — making this the edition in which the image that catalysed the novel's completion appears, appropriately, on its own cover.
The novel follows Theodora Goodman, an unmarried, overlooked woman in early middle age who, following the death of her domineering mother, leaves the constraints of her conventional Australian life for an increasingly dislocated journey through Europe and America — a journey in which the boundary between reality and delusion progressively dissolves, and which culminates in a quest for a kind of inner peace that borders on, and may in fact constitute, madness. Contemporary critical response divided sharply along geographical lines: American reviewers greeted the novel as evidence of a serious literary artist's arrival, while the British and Australian reception was considerably more muted — James Stern in the New York Times called it "brilliant, original and highly intelligent," while the Sydney Morning Herald's reviewer conceded its polish while warning it was "a book for highbrows." Viking sold 6,000 copies in the United States within a month of publication, necessitating a second printing; Routledge, by contrast, struggled to move its print run of 4,000 in the UK and Commonwealth market, ultimately remaindering 1,500 copies and subsequently dropping White from their list entirely.
Despite — or perhaps because of — its difficult and demanding reception, The Aunt's Story has come to be regarded by many critics as White's finest achievement: a work of extraordinary linguistic density and modernist ambition, structurally and stylistically indebted to Virginia Woolf, that pushed Australian literature decisively toward the international literary stage and helped clear the path for the more assertively Australian fiction that followed in the second half of the twentieth century. White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the first and to date only Australian to receive the honour, and The Aunt's Story is now widely read as the novel in which his mature voice first fully emerged.
Very good. Dust jacket price-clipped, in somewhat damaged condition: chipping and loss to creases, with numerous tape repairs made previously. Binding sturdy and tight, but some markings and delamination present on front board. Endpapers foxed. Contents otherwise very good, largely clear of markings. Bookseller's stamp for the Grahame Book Company to front free endpaper.
This book is currently on display in the rare book section of our Leichhardt store.
If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]
Catalogue Number: HH000153
