Helen Adair
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, [1903], 1903. First U.S. Edition. Hardcover. Octavo : 288p. : original green illustrated boards with black lettering. Uniform Edition printed in the U.K. for the U.S. market in the same year as the U.K. first edition. Attractive bookplate (The Heathcotes) on front endpaper and small bookstore sticker (bullocks, Los Angeles) to final paste-down. Slight rubbing to extremities. Very Good. Item #12169
Semi historical novel of convict days set in Australia. "This novel is so good that one wishes it could have been better, for the material is not trite and the plot is fairly well wove." (A. Grove Day p.130). A very good first American edition with the National Library being the only Australian library recorded as holding this edition.
George Lewis Becke (1855-1913) was born in Port Macquarie, NSW. He visited a number of South Sea Islands on his way to America as a 14 year-old and subsequently took part in trading voyages along the Californian coast and Pacific Islands. After returning to Australia, Becke spent some 25 years in the Pacific Islands. Becke moved to England in 1896, and spent some 13 years overseas before returning to Sydney in 1909. Many of his works naturally draw on his extensive experience in the South Seas. Better regarded for his short stories, Becke was more popular overseas than in Australia and was “envied by Joseph Conrad and compared in his lifetime with Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson.” OCAL, p87. Grove Day in the preface to his valuable biography of Becke (A. Grove Day, Louis Becke. New York, Twayne, 1966) argues that "not to know Becke is to argue oneself unoriented in Pacific literature."
Price: $120.00