The Tethered Bubble

New York/London: The Century Co.. Near Fine in Very Good dj. (c.1930). First Edition. Hardcover. [solid clean book with light wear at spine ends, very slight bumping to a couple of corners, vintage bookseller's label (Newbegins, San Francisco) on rear pastedown; jacket moderately edgeworn, with a few tiny nicks along the bottom edge]. Novel set in "a well-known woman's college in the year 1897, a time when 'higher education for females' was still a warmly debated topic." The book's protagonist, the youngest member of the faculty at "Brythley," feels that "some life and glamour may be found outside the college walls [and] stumbles upon love more suddenly and powerfully than she, in her innocence, had believe possible, [but her] romance is thorny and beset with dangers." Brythley is quite likely modeled after Vassar, where my research shows that the author was a member of the Class of 1898 (although this fact isn't noted anywhere on the book itself). The author seems to have written just three books: two titles for juvenile readers in the 1910s, and then this one; OCLC records only nine library copies in the U.S. and the U.K. -- one of them being at Vassar (aha!). (I also also found a copy of a history of Vassar offered for sale online that had her bookplate in it -- double aha!) And speaking of tethered bubbles: a 1926 newspaper article reported the then 3-year-old secret marriage of the author (née Fanny Lee McKinney) to one A. Garfield Weyant, a traveling auditor for the Lackawanna Railroad, after a 15-year romance -- the announcement of which had to be delayed until both the bride's mother and father (who "insisted his daughter remain at home") had kicked the bucket. .