Editoras

D. H. Lawrence-interest Further Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine

1932 · ref. 2791 — 68 Red Lion Street London: Blue Moon Press 1932. SIGNED LIMITED EDITION no. 14 of 99. 4to pp. 34 incl. b/w photographic frontis of Sava Botzaris' sculpture 'Olive Moore' pasted to verso facing title page. Original wood-effect patterned paper boards printed paper label to upper board. Bottom edge untrimmed. Printed on grey paper in black ink first initial green. Slight bend to boards wear to lower extremities corners bruised some darkening and cockling. Signed by Moore in black pen in her minute hand to limitation page. Else clean bright and tight. In the original delicate glassine dust-jacket preserved by a second brown paper one fashioned by PO with hand-written title to spine: worn and torn. Near fine/ good-only Jisc LHD locates 7 copies 5 legal deposit libraries except NLW/LGC UoNottingham & Senate House Library. A rather glorious copy of this fragile and oddly attractive edition of Moore's meditation on D H Lawrence which sold out almost immediately and within a year was "almost impossible to obtain." The elusive British author and journalist Olive Moore pseud. of Miriam Constance Beaumont Vaughan; 1901-1979 described variously as an "enfant terrible of British literature" "a cross between Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes but with a more biting wit" and aptly for this title "the female Lawrence" is perhaps best known for her sudden disappearance from the London literary scene from 1934. Recent scholarship which has significantly swelled knowledge of her later life and work reveals that "despite her rising success and notoriety as a novelist Moore was clearly unhappy": "I feel on the verge of collapse; all day; I weep down streets uncontrolled and unladylike" she wrote to the poet Rex Fairburn in 1932 the year her friends Charles Lahr and Alec Bristow of the Red Lion Bookshop published her Lawrence essay Cavey 2022. Lahr had known Lawrence well and Blue Moon Press had published the first unexpurgated edition of his final poetry collection Pansies three years earlier. 1932 saw a glut of Lawrence-related publications the author having died in 1930. A marked departure from her earlier three novels all published by Jarrolds Further Reflections proved Moore's penultimate literary publication and was included in her final outing the collection of pensées The Apple is Bitten Again Wishart 1934 as she was "sick and tired of being quoted and plagiarised without acknowledgement". The striking photographic frontis featuring Sava Botzaris' sculpture of the author was also reproduced in The Apple Is Bitten Again as well as being reused in the Dalkey Archive Press edition of Moore's Collected Writings 1992. Moore had married the Serbian sculptor in 1924; they separated in the late 1930s and divorced sometime in the following decade. Sophie Cavey 2022 'Olive Moore: A new biography' in Feminist Modernist Studies 5:1 pp. 1-20 Blue Moon Press hardcover