An advance presentation copy of the Hogarth Press edition in original blue marbled boards, this was copy that Eliot inscribed to the poet, novelist and biographer Richard Aldington, and it contains substantive autograph corrections or revisions by Eliot.
Though Aldington was openly critical of Eliot’s poetry, the two men were at first firm friends and Eliot even defended the younger man in his correspondence with James Joyce, whom Aldington had reviled as a damaging influence on young writers and a “tremendous libel on humanity”, but in 1931 Aldington published a cruel lampoon of Eliot (Blessed Jeremy Cibber) and his first wife, Vivien, entitled Stepping Heavenward: A Record, an act which permanently ended their relationship.
Also sold at £80,000 to Harrington was the 1915 first edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. Containing extensive typescript and manuscript corrections in the writer’s hand (as well a layout editor’s instructions to a
compositor), it is most likely the copy used for the revised, first American edition – the only other edition of her first book to appear in her lifetime.
Buyer’s premium: 17.5/15/10 per cent
£80,000 double for T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in the Frederick B. Adams sale
The Frederick B. Adams Jnr. library of English & American Literature was sold by Sotheby’s on November 6 and 7. The second day was devoted entirely to Adams’ magnificent Thomas Hardy collection, but among the highlights of the general sale was an inscribed presentation copy of the 1923, first English edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, illustrated right, that sold at a higher than expected £80,000 to Peter Harrington.
