MAUGHAM, W. Somerset.
Caesar's Wife: A Comedy in Three Acts.
London: William Heinemann, 1922.
$975.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152501
+$500
First Edition of W. Somerset Maugham's Caesar's Wife; Inscribed by Him
First edition of Maugham's comedy of a young wife and a much older husband in the British diplomatic world of Cairo. Duodecimo, original red cloth lettered in black. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Gerald, W. Somerset Maugham." It is suspected that Maugham inscribed this copy to Gerald Haxton, the American who was his companion, secretary, and the central relationship of his life from their meeting in 1914 until Haxton's death in 1944, although it is not proven. The gregarious Haxton drew from strangers the confidences that the shy and famously stammering Maugham could never have elicited himself, and their travels together through the South Seas and the Far East furnished the raw material for many of Maugham's finest stories, a debt the author freely acknowledged. In near fine condition. From the library of Craig Showalter.
Caesar's Wife, a comedy in three acts, was first produced at the Royalty Theatre in London in 1919. Set among the British community in Cairo, it reworks the situation of Madame de La Fayette's novel The Princesse de Cleves into the story of the young wife of a much older British consul-general who falls in love with his junior secretary. She must choose between her passion and the honor demanded of a public man's wife, a wife who, like Caesar's, must be above suspicion. It was one of the string of successful comedies with which Maugham dominated the London stage in the years around the First World War. William Somerset Maugham (1874 to 1965) trained as a physician before turning to writing and became one of the most popular and highest paid authors of his age, the creator of Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor's Edge, as well as the Ashenden stories drawn from his own service as a British intelligence agent during the First World War.
Caesar's Wife: A Comedy in Three Acts.
$975.00
In Stock
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