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DAWSON, Jennifer SKU: 19341 Barcode:
Stock No. 19341
Authors: Jennifer, DAWSON
London: Anthony Blond, 1961
First Edition, first printing, of the author's scarce first novel, set in Oxford. Small 8vo (7.5 x 5 ins); pp 176. Original brown marbled paper-covered boards, unworn and unhandled, with bright gilt lettering to backstrip. Text block tight and square, just some light bumping to lower corners. Feint spots of foxing to edges of text block. Internally very fresh. with no old inscriptions of other markings, free of soiling. Small brown sellotape burr at top of front pastedown. A neat rectangle has been cut out of the top corner of the front free endpaper, probably to remove an inscription, and the title on the half-title page fills the visual space. The remarkable debut novel recounting the traumatic experience of events when suffering from mental illness. Published a year before Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and two years prior to Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar", the novel was awarded the Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1961, the oldest British literary award. This was the book that Sylvia Plath was reading in February 1963, and for which she asked her friend Jillian Becker (with whom Plath and her children were staying at her home in Islington for the last three nights of her life) to return to her flat in Primrose Hill and bring back from her writing desk for her. Sylvia's reading copy may well have been the Penguin paperback edition, mentioned in the "Paperbacks in Brief" column in The Observer in June 1962 as "Jennifer Dawson's highly original novel of life in a mental hospital".
