The Hotel. A Play.

First edition. Small 8vo. 104 pp. Publisher's Indian red cloth, titled in navy-blue to spine. Light tan dustwrapper, printed in blue (priced at 5s. net to front flap). 1/1000 copies printed. Not published in the States until 1963, when an edition came out by The Dial Press in New York.

A fine copy in a slightly soiled dustwrapper.

Author's only published play, set in the nefarious world of arms dealing during the Spanish Civil War. Despite positive feedback from Maynard and Lydia Keynes and Virginia Woolf herself, his three-decade long engagement with theatre managements on either side of the Atlantic never bore fruit, and Woolf did not succeed in seeing his play performed. In a last ditch effort to have it produced, in 1967 he asked the then BBC drama director, Martin Esslin, to consider it for radio and television. Esslin turned it down on the grounds that it could not be considered a play – too many loose ends, no specificity of setting, uncertain origin of munitions fought over by the representatives of the Great Powers – and that it lacked interest for a 'present day' audience not expected to have lived through events leading up to World War Two. In his introduction to the American edition in 1963, however, Woolf feels justified to state that "what [the play] prophesied has happened."

"In 1938 I wrote a play, The Hotel, about the horrors of the twilight age of Europe, the kind of hush that fell upon us before the final catastrophe. It was written in those horrible years of Hitler's domination and of the feeling that he would inevitably destroy civilization". –Leonard Woolf, Downhill All The Way.

[Woolmer 462; Luedeking & Edmonds A30a; Leila Haghshenas, "Leonard Woolf's The Hotel (1939): The Singular Art of Unifying Contraries", Études britanniques contemporaines [Online], 56 | 2019]