Days Spent on a Doge's Farm.

Recollections Of The Italian Countryside

Symonds, Margaret. Days Spent on a Doge’s Farm. Illustrated. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893.

8vo.; black and white illustration throughout the text; endpapers and edges foxed; light foxing throughout, esp. preliminaries; ownership signature on front endpaper “Annette Wilson. Ashton Lodge. Turnbridge Wells;” red cloth; spine stamped in gilt and blind; spine lightly sunned and cocked; light wear to extremities.

First edition of this posthumously published description of life in the Italian countryside near Padua.

A travelogue of Symonds’s time spent in the Basso Padovano region of Italy, a place she geographically describes as “that sea of fertile land, bounded by the Euganean Hills and the Adriatic, which Shelley has described so wonderfully well. Lombardy comes up to meet it; Venetia and Padua claim it for their own.” The Doge that Symonds refers to is Countess Pisani, who resided in her family’s farm estate. Symonds acknowledges the fact that the Countess Pisani was not a true Doge, but took that name for her farm for aesthetic reasons. Symonds also admits that the book is more of a fanciful, imagined account of her stay, rather than an accurate summation of her travels. Many of the illustrations are her own; charming pen and ink etchings of her surroundings.

Margaret Symonds, known as Madge, was the daughter of John Addington Symonds, to whom the book is dedicated. In her prologue, Symonds says her father had promised her that he would write the introduction to the book – with his knowledge of that region’s history she thought it would add an edge of authority to her writing – but he died while the pair were on their way through Italy. This book, her only published work, came out when Margaret was 24 years old. It is a useful biographical account of a female writer whose promising literary ambitions were prematurely quashed. Her father’s death put a hold on her writing; then, in 1898 she married Will Vaughan, a headmaster at the Giggleswick School. She spent her time busied by the day-to-day management of the school. The Vaughan’s were close friends with Virginia Woolf and her circle; soon after, Virginia and Madge developed a relationship, one intimate enough that Virginia stayed with the Vaughan’s at Giggleswick after her breakdown in 1904. After reading Days on a Doge’s Farm, Virginia said it “expressed a person of true artistic soul.” (Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee)

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Item ID#: 5392

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