The Girls Of Radcliff Hall. Berners, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord, As Adela Quebec.

Scarce first edition, sole impression, presentation copy, inscribed by Berners on the half-title, "Noël Coward, with love from The Author, April 1935". After reading the book, in which Berners's homosexual circle is satirized, Coward wrote to Berners in exhilaration: "I absolutely adored Les Girls. Oh dear! What a beastly little book". The notorious roman à clef is a burlesque of Radclyffe Hall's banned lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, in the style of an Angela Brazil girls' school story. Berners depicts himself as the headmistress, Miss Carfax, and mocks the jealousies and intrigues of his Faringdon circle, who are represented as members of the girls' public school, Radcliff Hall. His targets include Cecil Beaton (Cecily Seymour), David Herbert (Daisy), Robert Heber Percy (Millie), Tchelitchew (Madame Yoshiwara), and Oliver Messel (Olive). The novel depicts Coward's lover, Jack Wilson (Helena de Troy), having an affair with Beaton's partner, Peter Watson (Lizzie Johnson), a suggestion which aggravated Beaton's personal spikiness towards Coward. The indiscretions alluded to created uproar, and most copies were destroyed at the request and personal effort of several of those portrayed. Surviving examples are naturally rare: when the work was reissued in 2000 by the Cygnet Press, its editor John Byrne wrote that he had seen only four copies. Octavo. Original brown wrappers, front wrapper lettered in black. Later pencil annotations to terminal blank. Light damp stains to spine and lower edges of wrappers, tiny marks to front wrapper, a couple of pages lightly folded, a very good copy.