Although resident in London, she was regularly published in New York by William S. George du Maurier thought her 'the cleverest woman of our acquaintance' (p. The translator Clara Bell (née Poynter, 1835-1927) was fluent in a remarkable range of European languages, rendering into English works by Ibsen, Balzac, and Georg Ebers, amongst others, in genres including romance, art, music, travel, and biography.

Published in three pairs of volumes from January to August 1886, it precedes Vizetelly's London edition of October. Other sets are often formed of a mixture of issues. Overall clean and tight.įirst edition in English, first issues throughout, with each title page dated 1886 and with the publisher's imprint on each copyright page. Minor wear and slight bumping to extremities one volume only with tiny dampstain at gutter and touch up to front joint. Early ink ownership signature to front free endpaper of one volume. All title pages dated 1886, Gottsberger imprint on versos. Original brown cloth with decorative stamping in black and bright gilt. 'There remains the greatest of all novelists-for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?' (Woolf). Tolstoy had then the power not only to awe the Anglophone world, but to shock it but those critics who found his novels 'as dirty and obscene as the worst parts of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass' (Maurice Thompson) fell into obscurity without wounding their target, whose stature has never diminished. The novel's quality survived the linguistic journey intact as an anonymous reviewer wrote, 'the worst paraphrasing from Russian to French and from French to English cannot efface the brilliant effects of the original.' Contemporary enthusiasm for the Russian novelists, and for Tolstoy in particular, was stronger and steadier in the US than in England: by the 1870s, 'there were probably three times as many American as British translations, and their quality was generally superior as well' (May). A remarkably lovely set of this first English rendering of Tolstoy's monumental classic, translated by Clara Bell by way of the French. First edition in English of one of the great novels of the 19th century, an exceptionally fresh and bright set.

War and peace novel