![[First Australian novelist] Grimstone, Mary Leman](https://media.app.artisio.co/media/104cbde6-0d38-43cb-9e0f-bb721ef57bcf/inventory/9e0e8e41-10ed-4442-afe1-233cd0ca216d/b2df7b10-c353-4df1-b540-35d02b1e8e1e/0001_iJyTSQ_original.jpg)
[First Australian novelist] Grimstone, Mary Leman
The Beauty of the British Alps
£1,008
Auction: 19 September 2024 from 10:00 BST
Description
Or, Love at First Sight. London: G. Virtue, 1825. 8vo in half-sheets (20.4 x 13cm), iv [1] 4-549 [1], contemporary marbled calf gilt, marbled endpapers, engraved frontispiece, 4 engraved plates (of 5: lacking plate listed as facing p. 393), bookplate, front joint superficially cracked, section of cracking to rear joint, scuffs to covers, rubbing to extremities, tips showing through, intermittent spotting and browning to contents (light to moderate), quire 2K with faint transverse bars of browning to foot
Footnote
First edition of the first book by the first Australian novelist, extremely rare, no other copy traced in auction records, which show only a handful of copies of two other works by the author, namely Louisa Egerton (1830), written during and shortly after her voyage to Van Diemen's Land in 1825, and consequently the first novel written in Australia, and Cleone (1834). Grimstone returned to England in 1829, joining London's radical intelligentsia and associating with figures including Robert Owen and Elizabeth Gaskell; her 1834 novel Women's Love ‘advanced feminist ideas in much the same terms as had Mary Wollstonecraft’ (Australian Dictionary of National Biography). Copies of The Beauty of the British Alps were issued with Plymouth or London imprints on the title-page, though both versions appear to have comprised the same Oxford-printed sheets, with no priority assigned.