Poems

First edition. Sm. 4to. Pp. xii, [1]-89, [3 (blank)]. Publisher's linen-backed brown paper boards, morocco spine label ruled and lettered in gilt, top edge gilt, untrimmed fore- and bottom edges. Pale cream dust jacket printed in brown. First printing with "First published 1923," printed on the copyright page.

Offsetting from jacket flaps to endpapers, hint of toning to page edges, in a soiled dust jacket neatly cut in two along upper backstrip fold with a large chip to the crown of spine, smaller loss to the tail, and several nicks and chips to extremities. In very good overall condition, with poor jacket now in protective wrapper.

Author's posthumous collection of poems, most of them hitherto unpublished, edited and with an (anonymous) introduction by her widower, John Middleton Murry. It comprises "Poems: 1909–1910," "Poems: 1911–1913," "Poems at the Villa Pauline: 1916," "Poems: 1917–1919" and "Child Verses: 1907." Largely known for her "brilliantly compressed short fiction," Mansfield died from the effects of tuberculosis at the tragically early age of thirty-four. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf regarded her as her only serious rival.

[Kirkpatrick A7a]