Search Results: Titles starting with S from Shannon Storey

Originally published in 1866, "Snow-Bound" is an idyllic narrative poem filled with nostalgia and remembrance of the author's youth and New England home. Whittier, one of the fireside poets, managed to capture for some readers a snapshot of a rapidly disappearing rural past in a post-Civil War America. The poem became successful and well-known in its time.
Contemporary white hardcover with dust jacket. Signed "John G. Whittier March 15 1892" on FFE. Owner's signature and date ("Harriet Osgood Munger March 14. 1892.") and inscription ("With greeting to Mrs. Fairbairn from Mrs. Munger. New Haven, Conn. April, 1892") on half title page. Reverse of frontispiece lightly foxed. Interior pages clean except for page 17 in which somebody pressed a flower; this has left a flower-shaped mark on page 17 and facing page (reverse of a design page - see images). Blue ribbon marker detatched by all but a thread and frayed at each end. Top edges faded blue. Board edges browned.

Best known for her high-profile divorce and subsequent pressuring of Parliament to pass the Infant Custody Bill of 1839 and Marriage and Divorce Act of 1853, Norton wrote this sonnet upon the death of her friend, the Honorable Miss Caroline Fox, who died childless and unmarried and who had been a favorite amongst her nieces and nephews. The sonnet, though unpublished and all but unknown in her lifetime, was reprinted by the sixth Earl of Ilchester, Giles Stephen Holland Fox-Strangways, in his 1938 Chronicles of Holland House 1820-1900. Norton sent the verse in a letter to Charles Fox upon his aunt's death. The opening reads, "'Sonnet upon an old woman seen reading by a lamp, 1842, describing her, not as she is, but as she ought to be and some partial friends suppose her really to be'" (Ilchester reprint). The sonnet is also listed in Henry Sotheran & Co's 1881 and 1882 Bookseller's catalogues as handwritten in Norton's presentation copy of Lord Holland's 1817 Lives and Writings of Lope Feliz de Vega… Read More