The Open Air: An Anthology Of English Country Life [Nancy Astor]; Bell, Adrian; Stone, Reynolds (Title Page Vignette) Modern Firsts,Signed & Association Copies

FIRST EDITION, NANCY ASTOR's COPY. 8vo, pp. [1-4], 7-368 (as usual). Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Spine cocked, cloth splitting at upper joint, rubbed, large stain to front board. "Nancy Astor" in brown ink to ffep, some foxing, esp. endpapers. Else, clean and tight. Good-only A well-handled copy of the journalist-farmer's anthology, with Nancy Astor's name inscribed to ffep, but without a Cliveden Library shelf label. Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor (1879-1964) was an American-born British politician and the first woman to sit in British parliament, serving as Unionist MP for Plymouth Sutton from 1919 t o 1945. From the year of publication – 1936 – onwards, Astor's reputation suffered "irretrievable damage" due to journalist Claud Cockburn's attacks on the 'Cliveden set' (ODNB). Adrian Bell's anthology, through which he "tried to catch some glint of the genius of the country in an oblique, perhaps the only way", opens with Thomas Hardy and juxtaposes Wordsworth and Thomas Bewick, Gertrude Jekyll and Mrs Gaskell, D. H. Lawrence and Gerard Manly Hopkins, as well as Thoreau and Proust, amongst others. He thanked Mrs Q. D. Leavis for "all her help". Bell (1901-1980), a Suffolk-based farmer, was a significant contributor to rural or 'land literature,' and is perhaps best known for his trilogy of novels Corduroy, Silver Ley & The Cherry Tree (1930-32), and being the first Times crossword compiler. Astor and Bell don't appear to have known each other personally.