Another Country

pp. 295. Small 8vo. Former owner's bookplate on front pastedown. Lightest shelfwear; near fine in chipped, lightly soiled, edge-worn, good+ dustjacket. A novel of infidelity, bigamy, Malta, callous Englishmen, and doomed love. In 1927, a British publisher offered a prize for the best novel written by an undergraduate of Oxford, or Cambridge, University. The Committee of Judges discovered that, out of all the manuscripts received, 'one stood out so eminently above all the rest that a suspicion arose as to whether it might not have been written by some experienced novelist and therefore submitted unfairly in this prize competition. The judges decided, in order to prevent a hoax being perpetrated on them, to invite the author to London on the pretext of talking over the manuscript. Imagine their astonishment when a pretty girl of eighteen walked into the room. No one had ever thought of the author as being a woman, but this slip of a girl, a regular student [at] Oxford University, was the author.' The author was Helene Du Coudray, a Russian immigrant, who was born Helene Heroys in Kiev in 1906. She spent her childhood in St. Petersburg, and was exiled to England at the age of twelve. After being graduated from Oxford, she settled in Geneva where her fluency in languages enabled her to work first as a translator, and then as a biographer. She published three other novels, and a major biography of Metternich. This book was first published in 1928, by P. Allan and Co., and immediately went into four printings in England. This is the first American edition, which was published from the British sheets. It has recently been re-published by Maia Press; however, copies of original editions are now exceedingly scarce.…