The Constant Nymph

THE RARE FIRST ISSUE, IN FIRST ISSUE DUST-JACKET

KENNEDY, Margaret. The Constant Nymph. 12mo, original red cloth, pp. 336. London: Heinemann, 1924.

First Edition, first issue, one of "possibly as few as 12 copies issued to reviewers, with ads on verso of half-title."-Sotheby's (2012). In first issue creme colored dust-jacket listing eleven titles in "New and Recent Fiction" from Galsworthy's The White Monkey to Arthur Mason's The Cook and the Captain Bold. We have seen this title bibliographically described a couple of different ways, but as for this copy, it is bibliographically identical to the copy catalogued by Howard S. Mott in List #161 (1958), #100, as "First Issue. With ads on verso of half-title and with the title page uncancelled", as here. The author's second novel, a surprise best-seller, is the first novel of what can be called a "Bohemian" genre, and for its time, shockingly sexual in its description of adolescent sexuality. In 1926 Kennedy and Basil Dean adapted it into a highly successful West End play with Noël Coward and Edna Best. Coward was replaced by John Gielgud during the run. Successfully filmed several times, most notably in 1943, starring Charles Boyer and Joan Fontaine. "The eternal feud between order, civilization, tameness, and the freedom of the artistic temperament, is typified in the unstable marriage of a pattern young lady, daughter of an Oxford don, and the composer Lewis Dodd, who is as brutal and titanic as Emily Brontë's Heathcliff. An unforgettable family group is Sanger's Circus, the women and children, legitimate and illegitimate, of a disorderly musical genius one of whose daughters plays the part of Cathie to Dodd's Heathcliff."-Baker & Packman, p. 277. Fine, in very good first issue dust jacket whose spine is moderately sunned, and which is missing a small 1 ¼ x 1/8" California-shaped piece on the right side of the rear panel where book size and prices for individual titles are advertised.