Innocents: Variations on a Theme

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Very Good in Good dj. 1948. First American Edition. Hardcover. [moderate shelfwear, some age-toning and dust-soiling to edges of text block, one-time owner's name printed neatly in blue ink at top of front endpaper; the jacket is edgeworn, with tiny nicks and minor paper loss at most corners, fading to spine, spotting/soiling to rear panel and edges of both flaps]. The author's first book, a collection of eight short stories, "chiefly occupied with the impact of experience upon innocence and innocence upon experience, with the blind collisions between young lives and older ones. [The author] has a remarkable gift for moving easily in and out of a child's mind and thus focussing a situation alternately from the innocent and the sophisticated point of view." Per the jacket blurb, its author was given "the first annual award of Mr. Somerset Maugham's prize of five hundred pounds, to be given each year to a young British writer of a published literary work of outstanding quality." Far from being an early-blooming flash in the pan, however, Ms. Barker went on publish eleven novels and eight more story collections. At her death in 2002, The Guardian praised for "a voice uniquely her own," and noted that "Barker always stood a little aside from her characters, viewing them with somewhat malicious amusement, touched with compassion. A mistress of scrupulous prose, she paid close attention to the delicate balance of power and how it shifts between man and woman, man and man, woman and woman." .