The Little Room and Other Stories
Chicago: Way & Williams, 1895.
First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. 145 pp, in original gray cloth with illustration and titles in blue, top edge gilt. Boards lightly toned at spine and edges, very slight spine slant, touch of soiling to top edge of front board; internals fine. A writer, teacher, and metalsmith, Madeline Yale Wynne was a founding member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society and later founded and lead the Deerfield [Massachusetts] Society of Arts and Crafts. She designed the cover for this book, the title story of which is her best-known work as a writer. As described in a blog post from the Library of America," the story was "recently praised by literary scholar Alfred Bendixen as 'one of the most effective ‘puzzle stories’ ever written.' Featuring a space whose contents anticipate the quantum quandary of Schrödinger’s cat, the mystery is set in a house inhabited by two unmarried aunts, who seem unperturbed by the different accounts they hear from visitors concerning what’s behind a particular door. The story’s themes have also invited modern feminist readings, such as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s appraisal in Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women: 'What haunts in this story, and what women are never able to find in the presences of their husbands, is an intimate feminine space—a space of refuge, healing, and play.' For some visitors, it becomes a “room of one’s own”; for others, it is a closet of domestic confinement."
Item #24263
Price: $200.00