One of forty copies only, issued to ‘A’ subscribers of the Hogarth Press, signed by the author ad personam, for Lady Dilke, on a subscriber’s slip tipped on to the front free endpaper. ‘A’ subscribers had deposited money with the press to receive all publications, as opposed to the ‘B’ subscribers who simply received notice of all publications.
The Dilke family were friends and neighbours of the Stephen family in London and featured in several of the ‘Hyde Park Gate’ stories, with which Virginia and her siblings used to entertain themselves as youths. Lady Ethel Dilke would later be on the English committee for the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, a French literary prize open to men and women, but judged only by women. It still thrives in France, and during the inter-war years was extended across the Channel, with a separate committee to choose a novel “calculated to reveal to French readers the true spirit and character of England”. Judging from comments to Vanessa Bell and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf had at best mixed feelings towards Dilke, describing her as “mincing, powdered, affected, vulgar, effusive, fawning”; Woolf won the prize herself in 1928, and described receiving it “in a South Kensington drawing room full of elderly fur bearing women, among whom the loveliest and sprightliest was Ethel Dilke.”
14-page publisher’s advertisements. Ownership inscription to front paste-down, ‘F [Francis] & E [Ethel] Dilke 53 Sussex Gardens W.2.’ Label browning slightly and nicked, front hinge just starting, and some foxing to prelims and final leaves, otherwise an excellent copy, housed in a protective brown cloth-backed box, lettered in gilt on a black leather label. Kirkpatrick A6a.
