The Woman She Was (signed copy)

London: Cassell, 1934.

Second edition, one month after the first. 8vo. pp [346]; portrait frontispiece and two plates. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in yellow, slightly bubbling to cloth on upper board and stain to the spine. With the illustrated dust-jacket featuring a photo-collage of the imaginary artist and her family. Large section of front panel of jacket detached, but present, losses to spine ends, edges nicked and chipped. Despite these faults, the book presents really well in Brodart jacket protector. A strong Association copy of Sieveking's imaginary biography of Charlotte Castleton, a successful fin de siècle artist and the first woman R.A., aptly inscribed to another important British artist, the studio portrait photographer Olive Edis. Sieveking's lengthy and somewhat cryptic inscription to the flyleaf is executed in turquoise ink and playfully headed "St Leonards-on-Sea July 11th 1912". He writes, "Darling Olive, I offer you this work full of bluebells, and we will come back, when you have read it, by the Circular Route. Please have some nice warm friendly memories of me - or even more - as I have of you". He signed of "My Love" followed by "Lance". Lance Sieveking (1896-1972) was a pioneering BBC producer and author. He sat for Ellis (1876-1955) several times in the 1920s. Indeed, she photographed many influential figures across her career, including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1909), Thomas Hardy (1914), David Lloyd George (1917), Nancy Astor (1920) and Emmeline Pankhurst (1920). In 1912 (the year of Sieveking's imaginary date of inscription) Ellis became "one of the first women to use autochromes, responding sensitively to their rich colours and inventing her own viewer" (ODNB). The following year she won a Royal Photographic Society medal with her autochrome 'Portrait Study' and became a member of the Society in 1914. She was appointed an official war artist in 1918, photographing British Women's Services and the battlefields of France and Flanders for the Imperial War Museum.