Book Notes
THE most comprehensive study of Shelley ever published is announced by Seeker and Warburg for September nth. This new biography, in two very hefty volumes, is the work of the Professor of English at Duke University, Dr. Norman Ivey White. It is compared by its English publishers to Dowden's authorised Life of Shelley, published in 1886, which it in some respects supersedes, for Dr. White has made use of a large amount of new "source material," including the diary of Harriet Grove, and letters bearing on both of the poet's elopements. The book is sumptuously produced and illustrated, and costs £3 13s. 6d. for the two volumes.
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A more modest approach to the same poet is suggested by the publishers' description of Shelley in Italy, an anthology of poems selected with an introductory essay by John Lehmann, which his own firm are publishing towards the end of this month. Shelley in Italy contains the greater part of the lyrical and dramatic poetry which Shelley wrote after he left England in 1818, and has been selected to show his genius at the height of its power and the influence of Italy and of Mediterranean civilisation on that genius. This anthology, which should surely be very illuminating, is coming out as a volume in Lehmann's Chiltern Library, that excellent series of reprints which began with new editions of Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton, and of Roderick Hudson by Henry James. Two new volumes in the same series will be published the week before Shelley in Italy. These are What Maisie Knew with Henry James' own preface, and In a Glass Darkly, a collection of Le Fanu's mystery stories with an introduction by Mr. V. S. Pritchett.
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A study of a more recent literary figure which should prove absorbingly interesting, is announced by &pc for publication in mid-September : Portrait of Edith Wharton, by Percy Lubbock (author of Roman Pictures and Shades of Eton), who knew Mrs. Wharton well. Cape are also producing a large volume of unpublished poems by Emily Dickinson.
Almost everyone has at some time read, or at least consulted, the works of James Henry Breasted, the American orientalist and author of Ancient Times and Conquest of Civilisation, but few people prob- ably know that he was a prairie boy who started life working in a store in Omaha. The story of Breasted's rise from this unpromising beginning to his world fame as an archaeological explorer in the Near East is told in Pioneer to the Past, a biography of Breasted by his son, Charles Breasted, which Herbert Jenkins are bringing out this autumn.
The first of a good and inexpensive series of "Cathedral Books" has just been published by Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. It is a shiny, three-and-sixpenny pamphlet on St. Paul's Cathedral, com- prising a set of very fine photographs of details of the building and its tombs' with a discriminating and highly instructive introductory essay by Miss Margaret Whinney, of the Courtauld Institute. Miss Whinney describes the successive stages of the building of St. Paul's learnedly, but readably too. This book, and its successors on other English cathedrals, will supply a real want.
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Routledge are preparing a collection of the unpublished writings of Sidney Keyes, the young poet whose death in action during the war has been rated a serious loss to English poetry. This will form a companion volume to his Collected Poems, already issued by Routledge, and will contain a play, Minos of Crete, some short stories and selections from his notebook and letters. It will be interesting to see examples of Keyes' work in prose.
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