THE MONKEY PUZZLE

First edition, first printing. Original brown paper-covered boards with gilt titles to the spine, in the Ruskin Spear illustrated dustwrapper. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the foot of the spine very slightly bumped. The contents, with some spotting to the closed text-block edge that sometimes reaches into the margins, and a previous owner's inscription to the front free endpaper, are otherwise clean throughout. Complete with the lightly rubbed, nicked and creased dustwrapper that is toned to the spine and spotted to the flap folds. Not price-clipped (13s. 6d. on the front flap). Scarce.

The author's first and only novel. An obscure title that follows a young woman's chaotic path through life, first as a philosophy student, then a teacher, a psychiatric hospital patient, a wife and a mother. It has been noted as fitting in alongside post-war literature about intellectual women and the struggle for identity such as Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' and Doris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook'. However, it perhaps became best known for satirising the philosopher Freddie Ayers, who was the author's philosophy tutor at University College London in the mid 1950s.