Fall Flight

New York: Milton, Balch & Company. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1928. 4th printing. Hardcover. [a solid, clean copy, slight fraying to binding at spine ends; the jacket shows minor edgewear, a couple of tiny tears at the top of the rear panel, and a few nicks at the base of the spine]. Novel about a "shy, lonely, passionate girl, brought up in the Chicago of the nineties," who through "curious circumstances" ends up marrying a Russian prince, but later fleeing his estate (and the marriage) with the help of the prince's stable manager, "an attractive but déclassé Englishman." This was the second of two novels published by the author under the Gizycka name -- rather cheekily, to say the least, since she had quite messily divorced the abusive Count Gizycka years before, and all the more so because the book was a fictionalized version of that very marriage! Better known as "Cissy" Patterson, she was the sister of Joseph Medill Patterson (and as such a partial heiress to the Chicago Tribune fortune), who eventually went into journalism herself in a big way, becoming the first woman to edit and publish a major American newspaper. She was editor of Hearst's Washington Herald for a number of years before buying it and the Washington Times and merging them in 1939 into the Washington Times-Herald. (Her previous book, "Glass Houses," had been a sort of exposé of Washington society.) A passionate and outspoken woman, she once described herself as "a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch." Her child from her ill-fated first marriage, Felicia Gizycka (who also liked to fashion herself a Countess), also wrote a couple of novels, and mother and daughter were famously antagonistic towards each other. .