Typed first draft manuscript of 465 pages offering several thousand corrections and alterations made during its composition by the author Maurice Baring. Alongside his novel ‘C’, Adeane was Baring’s most popular and influential novel, telling the story of a complex and unfaithful marriage between a London barrister and his wife, Fanny, who resembles the mysterious Daphne Adeane of the title. She is a Catholic Creole woman whose story is revealed in fits and starts and even in ghostly form from the middle of the novel, before a final religious conversion by Fanny resolves the novel in a direction that anticipates the conclusion of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. With corrections to almost every line of the book, this typed manuscript ends up presenting a text that is close to the final printed version without being exactly the same, while also exposing Baring’s creative process in one of his major works.
DESCRIPTION: Stout pre-war half crushed olive levant morocco over sage green cloth covered boards, handsomely bound by Zaehnsdorf. Raised spine bands and ‘Daphne Adeane MS. Maurice Baring’ in gilt to spine. Marbled endpapers. Baring has used a variety of papers including headed paper for 3 Gray’s Inn Square, from the India Office, Whitehall (his former employer) and a Pall Mall gentlemen’s club, White’s. Some of the paper stock doesn’t fit the binding and has been systematically folded into the text along the foreedge. This is a first draft typescript, typed quite accurately by the author, mostly on rectos with occasional notes opposite on the versos. Each chapter is paginated but there is also a pencil system of through pagination.
Sequentially the text starts with a manuscript title page followed by the chapters in order. There are elaborate corrections and emendations throughout, all made by Baring in a mixture of pen, pencil and blue crayon. Additionally there are paste-overs and inserted leaves of additional typescript and manuscript. Long passages of typescript are crossed through, to be banished from the finished text though still legible here. Chapters XIII-XV are particularly heavily altered, as Baring reconfigured the scenes in which Michael once again falls in love with his wife, Fanny. Here Baring has repeatedly interpolated runs of manuscript pages in order to introduce new drafting. A comparison of a few passages suggests that the ‘finished’ text in the MS is close to the final one but still differs substantively. A first edition in jacket of the published novel for comparative purposes accompanies the MS.
Provenance: Sotheby & Co, 11th May 1953, Lot 348, ‘Property of Ccount Benckendorff... presented by the author to the owner’s mother’ (1953 Sotheby’s Catalogue laid in)
Maurice Baring (1874-1945), Eton and Trinity College Cambridge, worked at the Foreign Office before devoting himself to poetry and novel writing, novels which have been praised as ‘minor masterpieces in character study and social depiction.’ Baring’s papers are held at Eton College, the Harry Ransom Center, Boston College and Yale University
