The Memorial: Portrait of a Family.

ISHERWOOD, Christopher.

$1,600.00

Item Number: 142447

London: Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1932.

First edition of the author’s classic second novel. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by Christopher Isherwood on the title page. Very good in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by John Banting. Housed in a custom half morocco chemise and clamshell box. Uncommon signed.

Set in the aftermath of World War I, Christopher Isherwood's The Memorial is the witty, almost forensic portrayal of the dissolution of a tradition-bound English family. On the cusp of adulthood, the Cambridge student Eric Vernon finds himself torn between his desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice before dying in the war, and his envy of his father's roguish friend who survived the war. Published in 1932, when Isherwood was twenty-eight years old, The Memorial is the novel in which a dazzlingly talented young writer found his literary voice, the book in which Isherwood became Isherwood.