Author: JOAN LINDSAY (writing as 'Serena Livingstone-Stanley').
Title: Through Darkest Pondelayo. An Account of the Adventures of Two English Ladies on a Cannibal Island. Edited by Rev. Barnaby Whitecorn D.D.
Description: Chatto & Windus, London, 1936. 1st Edition. Hardcover. First Edition (first printing) of the author's first novel. [viii] + 200pp including four pages of 'appendicites'. With a photographic frontispiece and twelve captioned black and white photographic plates. Purple cloth with very slightly dulled gilt lettering to the spine. Top edge dust soiled with a little wear to the spine ends and corner tips. Dealer inkstamp to the front pastedown. Binding a little tender at several gatherings. A good bright copy. No dust wrapper. A satirical parody of popular travel books, full of intentional grammatical errors and with the photographs comically edited to depict absurdist fearsome situations. Lindsay wrote the novel after returning from a tour of England and Europe, and intended it as a satire of the English abroad; the publisher 'entered fully into the spirit of the thing, presenting the book on exaggeratedly thick paper in the true manner of offering a book of tremendous importance', and the stirring title page poem is similarly contrived, both its author and his 'Anthology of the Homeland' being entirely fictitious. Over thirty years later Lindsay would write her most celebrated novel, 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'. Good/No Jacket.

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