The Semi-Detached House. Edited by Lady Theresa Lewis. [And:] The Semi-Attached Couple.

Notes

The scarce first appearances of the Semi-Attached Couple and the Semi-Detached House, the entire novelistic output of Emily Eden (1797-1869), daughter of the 1st Baron Auckland, who also published travel writing and sketches. Eden was a great admirer of Jane Austen and mimics her light touch and social comedy, though she came from a more worldly milieu: 'Emily grew up in a household at the centre of early nineteenth-century political and cultural life. She was from her adolescence a sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued observer of that world' (ODNB). As a result her books mix in more class perspective and political content than Austen's, but also more melodrama in the plotting.
The Semi-Detached House, her first published novel, is a contemporary satire in which a pregnant society lady has to share a middle-class home and revisit her class prejudice; its success encouraged the publication of the Semi-Attached Couple, which had been initially composed in the 1820s and centres on a wealthy but unhappy couple in the run-up to the Reform Bill of 1829. The preface of the latter apologises for the old-fashioned narrative (written before railroads and postage stamps, as well as polling reform).
Both books were well-received in their day and republished several times in the 20th century - and even explicitly called what 'you go on to when you have run out of Jane Austen's novels' by the Washington Post more recently - but remain under-known and exceptionally scarce in the first edition. Sadleir had copies of both works but Wolff the 'Couple' only in first edition, and 'House' as a yellowback reprint.