£650
8vo, pp. [3]-320. [Bound with:] Grey, Mrs., The Gambler’s Wife. London; Clarke, Beeton & Co. [n.d.] 8vo, pp. [iv], 415, [1]. Contemporary half calf, marbled boards, brown morocco label, spine blocked in gilt, edges sprinkled red. Just a touch of spotting. A little rubbed to edges, spine somewhat sunned. Red ink stamp of the library at Ickwell-Bury, the Bedfordshire estate of the Harvey family, to flyleaf.
A scarce, cheap edition of Austen's novel. This printing of Emma is not in Gilson, who records the 1849 printing and reprints dated 1850 and 1853. He also notes that the copyright of Emma remained with Bentley until 1857, suggesting 'presumably Simms & M'Intyre had come to some arrangement with Bentley'. Barchas is less reticent, referring to the 1849 Simms & McIntyre edition as arriving 'in defiance of copyright and good manners [...] these paperbound books flew in the face of professional niceties such as copyright, fussy bindings, and pricing norms' (Barchas, The Lost Books of Jane Austen, 2019, p. 46).
It is joined here by a single-volume reprint of the 1844 three-decker novel The Gambler's Wife', originally attributed to 'the author of 'The Young Prima Donna', and on the engraved title-page here to a 'Mrs Grey'. Most cataloguers follow William Cushing's 1889 Anonyms in attributing the work to an Elizabeth Caroline Grey, with the putative dates 1798-1869. Recent painstaking work by Patrick Spedding has unpicked the various attributions to Mrs Grey and revealed that no details of E C Grey can be substantiated, suggesting the true author was one Catherine Maria Gray, née Grindall (1798-1870) instead ('The Many Mrs. Greys: Confusion and Lies about Elizabeth Caroline Grey, Catherine Maria Grey, Maria Georgina Grey, and Others' PBSA, 2010).
