LAWRENCE, D. H.. Aaron's Rod.. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922, 1922.

Price: US$3552.33 + shipping

Description: First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "Bettina from D.H.L." Elizabeth Humes (1894-1970) was a European-based American trade commissioner whom Lawrence met in Capri, Italy, in 1920. Five years later, he fictionalized her and her mother as the principal characters of his novella St. Mawr, Lou Carrington and her mother Mrs Witt. Humes took as her fiancé Jan Juta, the South African-born painter who illustrated Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia (1921). The year following the publication of Aaron's Rod, Lawrence expressed his fondness for Humes in a letter to Gilbert Seldes: "If you go to Vienna, look up Elizabeth Humes, at the Office of the American Commercial Commission. I'm sure you'd like her. My wife & I like her very much" (Moore, Letters, II, p. 741). "In this and subsequent novels Lawrence's voice often, quite consciously, came from the sidelines; in them he would stage guerrilla attacks as well as full-frontal assaults; his writing would be goading, insistent, revelatory. In Aaron's Rod he went closer than ever before to writing directly about sexual experience" (ODNB). The American edition precedes the British by two months. This copy is in the first variant binding, lettered in black rather than gilt; there is no priority. Roberts & Poplawski A21(a.1). Harry T. Moore, The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1962, & The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence, 1955. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine and front cover lettered in black, front cover ruled in blind. With supplied dust jacket. Spine creased and rubbed, dent to foot of rear cover with concomitant rumpling of cloth and leaves, contents lightly toned, scattered foxing; jacket faintly soiled, red colours still bright, nicks and shallow chips to extremities, short closed tear to foot of front spine fold, unclipped: a good copy in very good jacket.

Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom