LADY WILLOUGHBY: Or Passages from the Dairy of a Wife and Mother in the Seventeenth Century. From the Second London Edition. by Rathbone, Hannah Mary - 1851

A.S. Barnes, New York:, 1851 pp. iv, 193, (10 unnumbered pages of publishers advertisements) 12mo. 200mm. Original publisher's full red cloth binding embossed and in blind with center cartouche of Barnes & Co. Spine ruled in blind and lettered plainly in gilt. Boards rubbed with light soiling. Spine darkened and brittle with wear to head and base. Corners frayed. End papers with publishers advertisements. First American edition. Contents clean. Hardbound. Very Good. Hannah Mary Rathbone (1798-1878) was an English writer and the author of The Diary of Lady Willoughby. Influenced by her father's tastes, she had read many histories and memoirs of the Civil war and adjacent periods, and her publisher (Thomas Longman) took great pride in bringing out the Diary as an exact reproduction of a book of the seventeenth century, in which it was supposed to be written. He had a new fount specially cast at the Chiswick Press. In some quarters the Diary was at once accepted as genuine; in others, author and publisher incurred indignant reproof as having conspired in an intentional deception. Readers speculated on the identity of the writer; and Robert Southey, Lord John Manners, and Mr. John Murray were in turn suggested. In the third edition the publishers and author inserted a joint note avowing the real character of the book. In 1847 Mrs. Rathbone issued a sequel under the title Some further Portions of the Diary of Lady Willoughby which do relate to her Domestic History and to the of the latter Years of the Reign of King Charles the First, the Protectorate, and the Revolution. The two parts were in 1848 re-published together. The general excellence of Mrs. Rathbone's workmanship, when she is at her best, becomes most clearly evident if Lady Willoughby's Diary is compared with Anne Manning's Life of Mary Powell (1850), which manifestly owed its origin to the success of the earlier work, but is altogether inferior to it. NW51. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good.