The Aloe

Limited first edition. Medium 8vo., [viii], 162, [2] pp. Publisher's gilt-stamped light brown buckram, top-edge gilt, other edges untrimmed. Decorative chapter initials printed in red. Plain fawn dust-wrapper, titled to front and spine. Introduction by John Middleton Murry. 1/750 copies printed.

Previous owner's name on front endpaper. Fine in an unusually Fine example of the dust jacket with a closed tear at the top of the lower flap.

One of Mansfield's longer works, first published in a much shorter form under the title "Prelude," by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in July 1918. Partially autobiographical, this evocative tale of a rurally bound colonial New Zealand family, whose harmonious front only serves to conceal an underlying sense of unease, was originally written in the spring of 1916.

[Kirkpatrick A11a; Mantz A10.a]