THE WOMAN OF THE HOUSE: An Elegy.

First edition, first printing. One of 250 copies. Signed by the author. Original stitched card wraps, with integral dustwrapper lettered black and red to the front panel. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. There are a handful of small, light indentations visible to the outer edge of the front of the dustwrapper, which is also a little toned to the margins. On page 10, the author has struck through the line, "While the mist came down like chronic catarrh", with its replacement, the more innocuous non-simile, "Under leaky thatch listening to seabirds" written above (a change that the author seemingly made to copies he signed). Priced 5s net to the front flap. A particularly attractive copy.

Signed by the author in blue ink to the verso of the second blank page at the front. 'The Woman of the House', subtitled 'An Elegy', as the author's short prefatory note explains, was written "In memory of Lucy, widow of Lieutenant-Colonel the Reverend Thomas Ormsby, D. S. O., of Milford, Cloghan's Hill, County Galway, by her grandson. 1873 - 1958". According to the poem's opening lines, it was Lucy who, "On a patrician evening in Ireland / [...] in the guest-room: delivered me". In return, he proposes to "deliver her from the cold hand / Where now she lies, with a brief elegy". Across twenty-four unrhymed quatrains, it is both tribute and reanimation, a "grave and tender elegy", as Seamus Heaney has written of the poem, through which the poet's beloved grandmother, "Beneficent, munificent, [...] is made to walk again behind the dry-stone walls of the quatrains, each of which forms a kind of invocation." (Seamus Heaney, 'The Poetry of Richard Murphy', in Maurice Harmon (Ed.), 'Richard Murphy: Poet of Two Traditions' [Dublin, 1978])