House of Splendid Isolation.

O'BRIEN, Edna [Erica Jong].

$950.00

Item Number: 142675

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994.

First edition of O’Briend’s haunting and delicately poetic thriller. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “My dear Erica – to meet again and to find you as a friend. Love Edna Dec. 94.” The recipient, Erica Jong remains best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Written in the first person and narrated by its protagonist, 29-year-old American poet Isadora Wing, Fear of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s and encapsulated the movement’s redefinition of female sexuality. In interviews, Jong stated: “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together… What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973.” The novel remains a feminist classic and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. With an additional autograph transmittal letter signed by O’Brien to Jong laid in. From the library of Erica Jong. Near fine in a very good dist jacket. Jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye.

O'Brien's seventeenth novel, House of Splendid Isolation depicts the relations of an Irish Republican Army terrorist and his hostage, an elderly widow living in a remote old house outside an Irish village. "O'Brien's prose is so right and original, her characters so urgently present, that a strange kind of elation is induced, reading about events that arouse our deepest fears" (Patricia Beard).