A Lady of Quality

8vo., publisher’s green cloth, lettered in gilt and blind to upper board and spine, with decorative devices in blind to the same; all edges untrimmed; pp. [viii], vii-x, [i]; 2-368, [iv, ads]; with illustrated captioned frontis, and title page in red and black; boards a little pushed at spine tips and rubbed to extremities, else fresh; internally very good, some light spotting to the edges of the text block, and to prelims; endpapers a little browned and offset; three page publisher’s catalogue to rear very roughly opened, with some loss to the outer margin (not affecting text). Fourth UK edition, published in the same year as the first. This copy inscribed by the author to the ffep with a handwritten quote from the novel: “‘It’s a bitter thing when the bird that flutters within has only little wings. All the more should those who are strong protect and comfort them’, Frances Hodgson Burnett, ‘98”.Perhaps best known today for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and The Secret Garden (1911), Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in England, but emigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1865, meaning that the majority of her novels were first published from Tennessee, where she began writing  at the age of 19 to help supplement her family’s income, publishing stories in local magazines. By the 1890s she had married and bought a house in England, from which she wrote The Secret Garden. Part romance, part melodrama, the dark, moral tone of A Lady of Quality made it the second highest-selling novel in the U.S. in the year of publication. The plot follows Clorinda, whose mother dies in childbirth leaving her to be raised by her dissolute father alongside her nine siblings, leading her to become a rebellious and somewhat unconventional character. As a young woman arriving into Restoration society, she must choose between a series of suitors, some of whom will test her independence and courage which threaten both her reputation and happiness. “A Lady of Quality is a novel about the invincibility of the human spirit” the publisher Pan Macmillan later wrote of their new edition “.the refusal of a woman to be mild and submissive, the acceptance of all experience, and courage born of adversity.” Such lengthy manuscript notes by Burnett are uncommon thus. …