Charles Bauerle Illustrator (1 results)

First edition. First edition, first printing. 327; 306 pp. with frontipieces in each volume. Complete in two volumes. Bound in publisher's brown cloth with elaborate blindstamping, copper spine lettering, peach endpapers.Near Fine, light shelf wear, spotting to plates but contents generally bright; Vol. II corner of front free endpaper torn off, top margin and running title of pp. 71/72 neatly cut off, main text unaffected. Former owners' names written on endpapers of Vol. II. Blindstamping still quite distinct and fresh. Uncommon. A major, albeit forgotten mid-19th century abolitionist novel on race and gender by a white female American author. In Mulattas and Mestizas Suzanne Bost call sit "a sentimental tragedy of a light-skinned woman from the Caribbean island of Santa Cruz," noting that the author "uses U.S standards of black-white racial separation in her depiction of European and Caribbean race dynamics. Since Zoe [as a "quadroon"] is neither black nor white, she has no place in a system based on rigid divisions of color," hence her tragic, Christlike end.