THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913. First Edition. Hardcover. Bookplate stamped "Discarded" with slight offsetting to the endpaper; perforated stamp to bottom margin of one text page; slight foxing to the front endpaper and a few other pages; rear endpapers with library slip and pocket, also stamped; front hinge cracked and a little loose. Covers are bright with strong gilt, a small white ink symbol on the spine. Easily Very Good or better, despite the library markings. Original red cloth, lettered in gilt. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper: "'For Miss Reubell/from Edith Wharton/Nov. 1913." A scarce book to find signed, this is to Henrietta "Etta" Reubell, described by Wharton in her autobiography, A BACKWARD GLANCE, as "my old friend, and Henry James's" (Chapter 11). Reubell had a salon at her home where cosmopolitan expatriate writers and artists would visit including James McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and John Singer Sargent, who painted her portrait. In an 1876 letter from Paris to his brother, William James, Henry describes several women, including Reubell: "The other is a certain Miss Reubell, who has lived here always, is twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old and extremely ugly, but with something very frank, intelligent and agreeable about her. If I wanted to desire to marry an ugly Parisian-American, with money and toutes les elegances, and a very considerable capacity for development if transported into a favoring medium, Miss R would be a very good objective" (Edel, Leon: HENRY JAMES LETTERS, Volume II, pp. 41-42). James wrote more than 100 letters to Reubell. It is not known how many he received from her. This copy has 7 minor corrections made to the text, certainly by Wharton. The most recent inscribed copy we could locate at auction, which sold at Christies London in 2002 for about what we are charging for this copy, was noted as having 3 corrections, matching 3 of the 7 here. On the front pastedown is the bookplate of The American Library in Paris Inc. 1920.