The author’s own proof copy of a novel written to provide escapism from the harsh realities of war, with manuscript corrections in pencil, and occasionally ink, throughout in Farnol’s hand. These begin on the title page with an elaborate alteration of the work’s subtitle (which was ultimately accepted) from “A Sentimental Romance” to “A Sentimental Romance of Those days when there was less Heroism but more of everything else than in these death-filled, deathless years of Grace, Grief & Glory”, and with the book’s dedication added verso: “To Dudley Seymour-Nicholls / ‘Our Smiling Philosopher’ / This Romance is Dedicated / Feb. 1. 1945. Eastbourne”. Also relating to the title change is a single-sided ink manuscript letter from Farnol, presumably to his publisher, proposing the new subtitle, tipped in at the front of the work: “So spaced & phrased, would this not make a more arresting title-page”. The majority of the text pages bear varying degrees of annotation, with numerous verbal annotations altering words, occasionally adding sentences (plus two new chapter titles), and providing notes to the printer (“Printer – Please note – delete all hyphens in ‘eyeglass’”), as well as frequent crossings-out, marginal lines and other minor corrections.
DESCRIPTION: Later quarter green cloth over card wrappers with titles in black to the upper cover and spine. A very good copy, the binding tight, the covers bright. The contents with the half title page and final text page strengthened/repaired with Japanese tissue and with slight loss to the final text page are otherwise in good order throughout.
A romance novel penned during the final months of the Second World War by the prolific novelist and prime initiator of the Regency romantic genre, Jeffery Farnol (1878-1951). Set in the late nineteenth-century, as indicated by the work’s subtitle, Farnol hoped that the novel would provide something of an escape from the hard realities of a warring, industrial modernity: “those halcyon days before the invention of the infernal combustion engine and consequently before war had darkened the skies or scarred the earth”.
