Rives, Amélie. [Troubetzkoy, Amélie (Rives) Chanler. 1863 - 1945] — QUICK Or The DEAD? A Study

Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888. Early printing, if not the first, of the 1st book edition (cf. Wright III, 5572). Red cloth spine with marbled paper boards. Pp 433 - 522. Pp 523 - 574 comprise other material, e.g. "Western Investments for Eastern Capital", "Some Days with Amélie Rives" & "Our Monthly Gossip". 16 pp of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine Advertiser at rear. Frontis wood engraving of Rives. 9" x 6". VG (spine cloth sunned/extremity rubbing/paper beginning to yellow, as usual). Rives a Charlottesville VA writer who caused a public furor with this early work. Her heroine is a widow who had the aucacity to consider remarriage, which shocked propriety in late 19th C. Southern households. According to Newman [AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS], this work is a "more open, honest statement of the sexuality of women than the major realists of the period allowed". Needless to say, it was a best-seller. This copy in the original publisher's quarter cloth binding of the serial issue, as it had appeared in the April 1888 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.