"THE IDOL HAS COME SLIDING DOWN FROM ITS PEDESTAL": MAX BEERBOHM'S SATIRICAL "OXFORD LOVE STORY," ZULEIKA DOBSON, 1911 FIRST EDITION

BEERBOHM, Max. Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story. London: William Heinemann, 1911. Octavo, original russet cloth, uncut. Housed in a custom cloth chemise and half morocco slipcase. $1250.

First edition of the caricaturist and essayist's only novel and his most enduring prose work, an "Oxford love story" about a "beautiful young woman whose visit to Oxford occasions the suicide of all the undergraduates."

"By the time Max had married, retired from London, and settled in Italy, his position as one of England's foremost essayists was firmly in place. As early as 1898 Shaw had, famously, pronounced Max 'incomparable.' As a writer he had progressed towards a relaxed natural style… Max's writing attained even greater success with his next four books: in 1911 he published to great critical acclaim his only novel, Zuleika Dobson. This fantasy about the beautiful young woman whose visit to Oxford occasions the suicide of all the undergraduates has proved his most popular prose work; it has been the most continuously in print of all his books… Zuleika Dobson was included in the 1998 controversial Modern Library list of '100 best novels' of the 20th century, ranking 59th (New York Times, 20 July 1998)" (ODNB). "Although purportedly set in the Edwardian era, Beerbohm's only novel owes much to the author's memories of Oxford in the 1890s, where he was an undergraduate at Merton College. Indeed, he began to draft this 'Oxford Love Story' shortly after he had gone down… In a note for the 1946 reissue of the book the elderly Beerbohm denied that it was 'intended as a satire on such things as the herd instinct, as feminine coquetry, as snobbishness, even as legerdemain.' It was, he claimed, 'just a fantasy,' and its dandified style, its air of elaborate, frothy artifice, and its apostrophes to classical gods and muses reinforce the author's definition" (Parker & Kermode, Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel, 44-45). Without scarce original dust jacket.

Light foxing, chiefly to text block edges; rear inner paper hinge cracked but quite sound. Light dust soiling to cloth. Still a lovely, near-fine copy.