Driftwood from Scandinavia
London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1884.
Octavo, [iv], 297 pages with the title page printed in red and black.
Original cloth lettered in gilt on the spine and front cover; cloth a little rubbed, mottled and sunned, with minimal wear to the head of the front joint; paper lightly tanned; small nameplate on the front pastedown; minimal signs of age and use; a very good copy.
A rare and spirited travel book by Jane Francesca Agnes Wilde (circa 1821-1896), influential Irish poet, translator and feminist, and the mother of Oscar Wilde. 'From 1846 she began to contribute prose (as "John Fanshawe Ellis") and verse (as "Speranza") to the "Nation", where on 23 January 1847 her poem "The stricken land" (retitled "The famine year") was the great famine's first major poetic response. It indicted her own Anglo-Irish landlord class in terms used in Longfellow's anti-slavery poems ... "Driftwood from Scandinavia" (1884), based on old friendships with Swedes and her voyages to Sweden with [her husband] Sir William in 1858, included much of value on Scandinavian sociology and German romanticism' ('Dictionary of Irish Biography'). The appendix consists of an essay by Sir William Wilde: 'On the Scandinavian Antiquities lately discovered at Islandbridge, near Dublin'.
Item #124354
Price (AUD):
$550.00