1st Edition ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Letters to Imlay’ by C Kegan Paul – 1879

Published by Nevan O Shaughnessy on April 3, 2018April 3, 2018

PRESENTING AN EXTREMELY RARE FIRST EDITION hardback copy of ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters to Imlay, With Prefatory Memoir’ By C. Kegan Paul.

Published by C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1 Paternoster Square, London in 1879.

Printed by Bradbury, Agnew & Co., Printers, Whitefriars, London.

This EXTREMELY RARE book is in EXCELLENT condition for its age with some very minor ‘knicks’ on the edges of the spine and cover, but otherwise, extremely GOOD. The text is almost perfect with some minor foxing.

Green board jacket with gilt edge and gold lettering.

AS AN ADDED BONUS – the Book comes signed by it’s original owner:- Lida Calvert, a distinguished American Author, in her own right.

We can estimate that Lida obtained this book shortly after it was published as it was clearly before she married Major William Alexander Obenchain, as thereafter, she signed as Lida Calvert-Hall/Obenchain.

This book was part of the extensive private collection of the Calvert Hall/Obenchain Collection/Estate formerly of Virginia, Bowling Green, KY and later, Highland Park, Texas.

YOU WILL NOT FIND THIS BOOK ANYWHERE ELSE

THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT & HISTORICAL BOOK

What makes this Book SPECIAL is :-

(1) It is a VERY, VERY RARE First Edition and

(2) it is in excellent condition, and

(3) it was owned by a prominent American Author & highly recognized early Suffragist, Lida Calvert.

Eliza Caroline “Lida” Obenchain (née Calvert), (February 11, 1856 – December 20, 1935) was an American author, women’s rights advocate, and suffragist from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Lida Obenchain, writing under the pen name Eliza Calvert Hall, was widely known early in the twentieth century for her short stories featuring an elderly widowed woman, “Aunt Jane”, who plainly spoke her mind about the people she knew and her experiences in the rural south.

Lida Obenchain’s best known work is Aunt Jane of Kentucky which received extra notability when United States President Theodore Roosevelt recommended the book to the American people during a speech, saying, “I cordially recommend the first chapter of Aunt Jane of Kentucky as a tract in all families where the menfolk tend to selfish or thoughtless or overbearing disregard to the rights of their womenfolk.”

Eliza Caroline Calvert, daughter of Thomas Chalmers Calvert and Margaret (Younglove) Calvert, was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky on February 11, 1856. She was known as “Lida” throughout her life. Lida’s father Thomas Chalmers Calvert was born in Giles County, Tennessee to Samuel Wilson Calvert, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife Eliza Caroline (Hall) Calvert. Lida’s mother, Margaret Younglove, was from Johnstown, New York.

Lida attended a local private school, and then Western Female Seminary in Oxford, Ohio. She pursued two of the careers acceptable for a single woman in her era, teaching school and writing sentimental poetry. She began her professional writing career to help support her mother and siblings. Scribner’s Monthly magazine accepted two of her poems for publication in 1879 and paid her the equivalent of US$600. She continued writing and had at least six more poems published before age thirty.

On July 8, 1885, Lida married 44-year-old Major William Alexander Obenchain. Obenchain was a Virginia native and American Civil War veteran who in 1883 became president of Ogden College, a small men’s school in Bowling Green. Lida and William had four children: Margery, William Alexander Jr. (Alex), Thomas Hall and Cecilia (Cecil). Her family responsibilities left her with limited time to write. Her frustration as an unpaid housewife motivated her to support the cause of women’s suffrage and to work with the Kentucky Equal Rights Association.

In literary circles, Lida was known by her pseudo name, Eliza Calvert Hall. In addition to her commentaries on women’s suffrage written for Kentucky newspapers, she used many of her short stories to encode suffrage arguments. Those who read Aunt Jane of Kentucky, Lida’s first published collection of short stories in 1907, observed the simple mountain wisdom of Aunt Jane without being fully aware of the political subtext contained within the stories. President Theodore Roosevelt even publicly praised Lida for this collection of short stories that featured an elderly widowed woman, “Aunt Jane,” who told the experiences of the people in a rural southern town, named Goshen, to a younger woman visitor who relayed them to the reader. This type of rhetorical device, called a “double narrative,” was a common form of storytelling in this era.

William Obenchain died on August 17, 1916, after an extended illness. Family responsibilities caused her to move to Dallas, Texas to care for her daughter Margery, who had contracted tuberculosis. She continued to write, but her most productive years as a writer were past. After the death of her daughter in 1923, she stayed in Texas, where she died on December 20, 1935.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Calvert_Hall

Mary Wollstonecraft (/ˈwʊlstən.krɑːft/; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children’s book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft’s life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38, eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. This daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, became an accomplished writer herself, as Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

After Wollstonecraft’s death, her widower published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft’s advocacy of women’s equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft