Anglo-Saxon Review, 10 vols.
Lady Churchill’s Magazine
A Complete Run in Splendid Condition
Churchill, Lady Spencer Randolph, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Review. A Quarterly Miscellany. Vol. 1 June 1899-Vol. X September 1901. London and New York: John Lane, 1899-1901.
10 vols., small folio; illustrated; offsetting to endpapers and light foxing to preliminaries and fore-edges; varying bindings in morocco after celebrated originals, elaborately stamped in gilt; t.e.g.
A fine set of this remarkable periodical founded by Winston Churchill’s mother; listed by Rostenberg and Stern among the seminal feminist journals as item 41 in “Feminism is Collectible,” Between Boards, p. 180. While Lady Churchill admittedly allows space in her periodical for the great men of her time—works by or about, or portraits of, James, Gosse, Swinburne, George Washington, Poe, Crane, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, among others, appear—she provides a generous platform for her accomplished female peers: Elizabeth Robins and the Duchess of Devonshire both wrote for Volume One, in which portraits appear of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Anne of Austria, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and, of course, Her Majesty, the Queen. Portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Elizabeth Browning, and John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Lady Churchill appear in later volumes. As of the September 1900 issue, in which the second of her two articles appears, Lady Churchill identified herself on the title page in a parenthetical beneath her name: “(Mrs. George Cornwallis-West).”
Lady Churchill was supported in this venture by her son, but he disagreed violently with his mother’s choice of title and persuaded her to drop her planned sub-title, “Blood is thicker than Water,” before it was too late. He was not alone in finding the title bizarre: it suggests a learned journal on Beowulf and related subjects, or a compendium of nationalist discourses leaning towards the supremacist position. The Anglo-Saxon Review is, however, a fairly sophisticated literary journal, with contributions by Henry James, Gordon Craig, Max Beerbohm, Edmond Gosse, Maurice Baring, George Gissing, Andrew Lang, George Bernard Shaw, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, and many others literary lights.
Despite its fairly modest claims to literary merit, the real cause for celebration of The Anglo-Saxon Review is the bindings. Organized by Cyril Davenport, each of the ten large volumes is a facsimile of one of the world’s great bookbindings, well executed in full morocco, and with an explanatory essay by Davenport. The bindings include a magnificent Samuel Mearne, a Derome, a binding for James I, a painted Italian binding, and a book bound for James 1st. The ambition of these designs was somewhat sabotaged by the quality of their manufacture, and nearly all copies have since deteriorated badly. This set, however, has suffered only occasional scuffs and mild spine darkening.
An astonishingly lovely set.
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Jennie Jerome, a cosmopolitan woman by nature and by circumstance, was born in Brooklyn on January 9, 1854. The future artist, society figure, and political thinker was one of four daughters. Her father was a financier and she was born into a world of comfort and privilege as well as one in which she was surrounded by culture. (Remember, this was at the time when only the rich lived in Brooklyn, then a separate city created to divide proper folks from the riff-raff of Manhattan.) Jennie’s life was permanently altered at an early age by a trip the family took to Trieste. This continental sojourn planted in Jennie’s mother’s head “a determination that her daughters should become a part of the European world” (NAW). As a result of her mother’s ambitions, Jennie and her sisters were thereafter raised largely in Europe (France and England especially), and she determined for them that a cultured life in the theatre as well as a smart marriage would be the wisest move for each of her daughters.
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