Gabrielle de Bergerac

JAMES, Henry.

Gabrielle de Bergerac.

FIRST EDITION IN BOOK FORM. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918.

Small octavo. 153 pp. Cream cloth spine over green paper-covered boards with dark green lettering and decoration, in the original printed publisher's dust jacket. Slight darkening to the spine, else fine in a fine dust jacket. BAL 10701.

One of Henry James's earliest tales, gathered into book form only after his death. James wrote Gabrielle de Bergerac at twenty-six; it ran serially across three 1869 issues of the Atlantic Monthly (July–September) and was never collected during his lifetime. The story is one of the very few James set before his own century: pre-Revolutionary France around the 1750s, an aristocratic young woman and her brother's tutor, a love divided by class, and the shadow of the Terror to come.

The edition carries a further point of bibliographical interest: it was issued as the first volume of Boni and Liveright's "Penguin Series," and the jacket flap presents it as such — a short-lived American imprint unrelated to, and predating by nearly two decades, Allen Lane's British Penguin Books of 1935. Original printed jackets on trade fiction of this period are uncommon.

SKU TO-2026-104