The Cloven Foot. A Novel. By the Author of "Lady Audley's Secret" etc. etc. etc

London: John and Robert Maxwell..., no date 1879. FIRST BOOK EDITION. 3 volumes. 8vo, 181 x 120 mms., pp. [iv], 397 [398 blank]; [iv], 302; [iv], 288, contemporary half maroon calf, marbled boards, spines gilt in compartments with title in gilt; some wear to extremities but very good set, with the armorial bookplate of the author Richard Combe Miller (1841 -1916) on the front paste-down end-paper of each volume; and Miller's autograph in ink on the recto of the front free end-paper of each and below his autograph that of M. Meakin. The novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon (married name Maxwell) (1835-1915) worked as an actor from the age of 22, but began writing short stories and poems in 1859, publishing her first book, Garibaldi and Other Poems, in 1861. She became the companion, as it were, of the publisher John Maxwell who also published the sensationalist novel Lady Audley's Secret as a serial in 1861. The Cloven Foot does not disappoint by way of sensationalist content, involving such tropes as an inheritance, an exotic French dancer and her husband, theatrical derring-do, and exotic, sexualizing clothing. The provenance of this copy is rare, with the bookplate of Richard Combe Miller being absent from Howe's 3-volume catalogue of the Franks Bequest. The provenance is also relevant, with Miller being, like Braddon, a Victorian and Edwardian writer, as a poet as well as dramatist, with After Adam's Fall (1906) and Coronation Ode (1911) being among his books. Miller was a graduate of Exeter College at the University of Oxford, and was the son of Sir Thomas Miller, 6th Baronet. Later in life Richard Combe Miller was by turns Justice of the Peace for Kent and for Sussex, and Deputy Lieutenant of Kent. He was also the Mayor of Chichester as well as the Sheriff of Kent. Literary historians can be seen engaging deeply with Braddon's Cloven Foot in the twenty-first century, with Albert Sears noting that in 1878 Braddon "began The Cloven Foot, a novel decidedly sensational, featuring a murder, bigamy, and double identity. … By combining fictional discourses, absorbing responses from book reviewers, and manipulating readers' expectations, Braddon could venture beyond the authorial realm to which the name 'Braddon' and 'the author of Lady Audley's Secret' confined her. Twenty-first-century readers of Braddon are indebted to the renewed, large feminist, 'horizon of expectations' for Braddon's fiction: her works increasingly become more available to a wide readership. … To understand her simultaneous engagement and resistance to the sensation fiction marketplace, we need a reading practice that is dialogic, one that reads for generic expectation, but also attends to the ways her narratives surpass generic boundaries" (Albert C. Sears, Chapter 4 in Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. by Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (2006), p. 51). Sadleir 275. Wolff 633.