MRS. CRADDOCK.
New York: George H. Doran Company, n.d. [1920]. Original "Mortlake brown" cloth lettered in dark brown, with dust jacket. First American Edition of Maugham's fifth book -- published eighteen years after the 1902 London edition, which itself was withheld from publication for three years, trying to find a publisher who would publish such an "improper" book. It is the tale of a passionate woman who marries a "complacent male chauvinist" farmer named Craddock, and who subsequently falls in love with a nineteen-year-old young man; the character Bertha Craddock has been referred to as "a transitional figure between Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley" [Morgan]. This Doran edition still has the 1902 Heinemann excisions in Chapters XXXI and XXXII; it would not be until 1928 (post D.H. Lawrence) that a "new and revised" Heinemann edition would restore the expurgated passages. The reason Doran brought out MRS. CRADDOCK in 1920 is undoubtedly that during the preceding five years, they had published Maugham's big successes OF HUMAN BONDAGE and THE MOON AND SIXPENCE.
This volume, conforming in all ways to that described by Toole Stott as the first US edition, is in fine condition. The orange printed jacket is from five years later: the price is $2.00 (up from $1.90), and books listed on the flaps were published in 1925. Nonetheless scarce, the jacket is very good-plus (spine a little faded, one chip at its head that barely touches "MRS."). Toole Stott A5a. Provenance: discreet bookplate of Maugham collector Craig V. Showalter. Item #15921
Price: $195.00