LOLITA

First UK edition, first printing. Elizabeth Jane Howard's copy. Original black cloth lettered in silver to the spine, in the Eric Ayers designed dustwrapper. A good copy, the binding square and firm. Spine tips are rubbed and nicked, with a short tear to the cloth at the lower edge of the front hinge. The pink top-stain is a little dusty. With the posthumous Ex-Libris stamp, dated 2015, of the English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, the book clearly well-read, with a number of dog-ear creases to corners and marks to pages. A handful of passages are marked by Howard in the margin of the text. There are also two brief annotations. Complete with the dustwrapper, rubbed and nicked to spine tips and corners, with a handful of short closed tears to edges. `

Nabokov completed 'Lolita' in December of 1953; it had taken five years to write. He predicted that the novel's content would cause trouble and indeed the novel was rejected by every UK and US publisher who looked at it. Nabokov eventually placed it with Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press in Paris (Samuel Beckett had recently published 'Watt' with Girodias). Published in September 1955, across a pair of the distinctive green Olympia paperbacks, 'Lolita' received little attention until Graham Greene singled out the novel in the Sunday Times as one of the three best books of 1955. Owing to subsequent legal wranglings, however, 'Lolita' waited until 1958 for its first US publication (it was an immediate bestseller, for all the wrong reasons), and another year before appearing in the UK. This copy of the first UK edition is from the library of the English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014), whose fourth novel, 'The Sea Change' (a very different kind of book) was published earlier the same year. Artemis Cooper, in her biography of Howard, notes that she "had the satisfaction of being listed as one of the Sunday Times's Outstanding Books for November", joining John Braine's 'The Vodi', John Hersey's 'The War Lover' and 'Lolita', with Laurie Lee's 'Cider with Rosie' (Lee was a former lover) in the non-fiction category. Howard clearly read 'Lolita' carefully, with pen in hand. A handful of sentences are marked with lines and ticks, the passages singled out characterised by their distinctly Nabokovian use of far-flung similitude (two examples: "I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning [...] like a distant and terrible sun", p. 70; "It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed", p. 138). At the top of p. 110, Howard comments, gnomically, "Can't construct, is all", her own awkward construction neatly pressing home the point; and, on p. 158, where Humbert writes of sitting "with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart!", a swift line and economical "uh uh" are written in the margin. It was three years later, in 1962, as director of the Cheltenham literary festival that Howard first met Kingsley Amis (he had been invited to discuss sex and censorship in literature, of all things, with Carson McCullers and Joseph Heller). The immediate attraction was "powerful enough to end both their [existing] marriages", leading to their own marriage in 1965. Amis had written one of the most interesting of the UK reviews of Lolita for the Spectator in 1959. He disliked (and misunderstood) the book, while acknowledging and avoiding the common error of reading the novel as being in any way salacious. "It is encouraging to see all this concern for a book of serious literary pretension", he wrote, "even if some of the concern, while serious enough, is not literary in the way we ordinarily think of it. One would be even more encouraged if the book in question were not so thoroughly bad in both senses: bad as a work of art, that is, and morally bad — though certainly not obscene or pornographic." Perhaps ironically, it was Kingsley's son Martin, who was famously taken in hand by Howard as a disaffected teenager, nurturing him to become a keen reader and first-class Oxford graduate (recounted in Amis' memoir, 'Experience' [1999]), who later wrote some of the most sensitive and penetrating criticism of 'Lolita'. Could the young Amis have read this particular (and clearly well-read) copy? (Artemis Cooper, 'Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence', [London: 2016]; Janet Watts, 'Elizabeth Jane Howard Obituary', [Guardian: 2 January, 2014]; the UK first of 'Lolita' is omitted by Andrew Field in his Nabokov bibliography).

Stock code: 24021

£250

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