Deerbrook

First edition.

Beige half half contemporary bindings, flat spines, elaborate gilt tooling beneath the black calf title labels, volume numbering stamped at foot, upper joint worn on vol. I, rubbing to edges, corners and boards, headband loose on vol. I, combed paper pastedowns with small loss to lower board of vol. I, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, all edges marbled.

First edition of the debut novel by English feminist and abolitionist Harriet Martineau, a pioneering work in raising public awareness of gender equality and public health.

This handsomely bound copy once formed part of the library of her contemporary Lady Tyrconnel at Kiplin Hall in Yorkshire.

"In many respects a precursory work, this novel demonstrates the successful transmission of a literary form: Martineau inaugurates in Deerbrook the model of the provincial novel, which foregrounds members of the middle class at a time when they were not considered worthy of broader literary representation ("that highly valuable, but most unromantic and unpicturesque, portion of the community" Edinburgh Review, July 1839, 495). This novelistic idea of a provincial microcosm centred on the middle class shaped the works of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, all three of whom had read Deerbrook (Sanders 58-59). Despite the occasionally didactic character of the novel, Martineau's astute, original and compelling analysis of rumour and its epidemic dimension finds lasting resonance in the novels of her successors and continues to speak to us today." (Marie Duic, "Le bruit qui court : rumeur et contagion dans Deerbrook (1839) de Harriet Martineau")

Deerbrook stands as one of the indispensable landmarks of Victorian literature for its pioneering reading of the sanitary and moral crises then happening in England, and for its close attention to the social predicament of women of its time. The novel caught the attention of the most illustrious of Martineau's contemporaries: it was upon reading Deerbrook that Charlotte Brontë first wished to make her acquaintance. Writing under her pseudonym Currer Bell, the name under which she later published Jane Eyre, Brontë sent her an enthusiastic letter: "When C.B. [Currer Bell] first read Deerbrook, she tasted a vivid and novel pleasure [...] Deerbrook takes its place among the works that have truly done her good, enriched her ideas, and rectified her view of life."

The novel opens on an Austenian note (marriageable women and affairs of the heart) but quickly gives way to an altogether new plot: the love story is interwoven with an exploration of the difficulties faced by Dr Hope, a middle-class apothecary confronted with an epidemic in a village whose inhabitants are too ignorant to accept his scientific and hygienic remedies. The novel thus represents one of Martineau's earliest acts of advocacy on the subject, anticipating her later association with Florence Nightingale: "Martineau used her narrative to highlight the rise of professional medicine and how it was hampered by the general lack of understanding of the need for scientific knowledge and public hygiene. Once again an enlightened education of all was called for." (Ruth Watts, "Harriet Martineau and popular education").

 Martineau's choice to make the hero of Deerbrook a physician paved the way for celebrated novels such as Gaskell's Mr Harrison's Confessions and Wives and Daughters (1864-1866), and Trollope's Doctor Thorne (1858). The novel also embodies one of Martineau's deepest convictions, given brilliant expression in her portrait of the governess Maria Young: a masterful demonstration of independence through work ("for an educated woman ... there is in all England no chance of subsistence but by teaching") and for women's right to the finest education available.

A rare and elegant copy of this realist novel, herald of a new and immensely successful genre: "the village of Deerbrook becomes a fictional laboratory which, in its very formula, is the forerunner of the villages and counties that would appear a few decades later in the emblematic provincial novels of the Victorian age" (Marie Duic)

Provenance: Sarah Crowe Carpenter, Lady Tyrconnel (1799-1868), her ownership inscription on the title page of each volume. "Given to me by Gillis Carpenter" inscribed in her hand on the verso of the half-title; Sotheby's sale, 18 February 1980, lot no. 76.