A family copy of Sara Coleridge’s important prose and poetic fantasy tale, doubly inscribed on the front free endpaper, firstly by her daughter “Sara Du Sautoy from Edith Coleridge” and then by Edith’s first cousin “Ethel Boyce from Ernest Hartley Coleridge October 1877.” The double inscription is a little mysterious: Ethel Boyce (1863 - 1936), musician: her mother Anne had been a friend of Ernest Hartley Coleridge, who wrote and read the appreciation at her funeral; Sara du Sautoy is harder to pin down but may have been connected to the Rev. W.S.O. du Sautoy, a correspondent of the Coleridges.
The book – a fantasy grounded in memories of her Lake District childhood - was written “during a period of Sara’s most intense illness” (Mudge), which left her addicted to opium, and was inspired by her memories of growing up in the Lake District amongst the literary friends and family of her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Jeffrey W. Barbeau in his recent book on Sara Coleridge described it as her “most influential contribution to fiction” and it has long been identified as an important early work in the genre of fantasy fiction. She later said of Phantasmion, “I should never had put together such a string of waking dreams … if I had not been confined to my couch indoors, withdrawn from those sights of natural objects which I had been taking in, during my whole childhood and early youth, incessantly” (Swaab p.16).
Barbeau, J. Sara Coleridge her Life and Thought, New York, 2014; Mudge, B., Sara Coleridge A Victorian Daughter, New Haven, 1989; Swaab, P., The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought … New York, 2012.
