Fable in Gothic

Caldwell ID: The Caxton Printers, Ltd.. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1940. First Edition. Hardcover. [moderate shelfwear, some foxing/spotting to top of text block, one-time owner's signature on front pastedown; jacket torn at spine corners, a bit of paper loss at top of spine, small strip of old cellotape affixed to rear panel]. "The scathing and outspoken story of a minister who believed his wife's happiness was not too much to pay for his own advancement. Here is the needless tragedy of thousands of women who can neither love nor desert their husbands because they recognize their place as necessary social fixtures." The author, per the jacket blurb, was the daughter of an Episcopal minister, and was "the wife of an Army officer for fifteen years." (The husband in the book is an Army chaplain who "was 'called' from the Army to better and wealthier parishes," and was eventually revealed to be a "distraught and maladjusted man." The phrasing of the biographical tidbit doesn't make it completely clear whether or not Ms. Winter was *still* the wife of an Army officer at the time of writing the book, but it does mention that "in recent years [she] has lived in New York and Connecticut among writers and artists." So draw your own conclusions.) This was the author's first, and apparently last, novel; OCLC turns up a dozen institutional copies, all in the U.S., but there appear to be none in the marketplace at the time of this writing. .