"Scarlet Josephine"

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Good. 1933. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [moderately shelfworn, spine a bit turned, rear hinge cracked, some exposure of boards at lower tips, very slight fraying to cloth at top of spine, faint bookseller's rubber-stamp (Bertrand Smith Acres of Books, Long Beach) on verso of front endpaper, terrific vintage bookseller's label (Frog Pond Books) on rear pastedown (see second image)]. Very uncommon novel about a "sensitive, cultivated woman of thirty" who lives an unobtrusive life in a small Connecticut village, appearing "outwardly sedate, spinsterish, almost forbidding" to others -- but she reads Joyce and Lawrence and Hemingway, and "in her private thoughts and dreams [is] singularly uninhibited and modern." Her quiet life is upended, however, when she writes a scandalous best-seller about an international prostitute. One of the best books by this journalist/author, who turned out quite a few novels (almost all with strong-willed female protagonists) in the 1920s and 1930s. A kind of minor Lost Generation expatriate, Ms. Worthington's literary accomplishments have been unfairly overshadowed by her relationship with the notorious author/occultist/journalist/traveller/alcoholic/nutso William Seabrook, to whom she was married from 1935 to 1941. (She ultimately wrote a book about him, "The Strange World of Willie Seabrook," twenty years after he committed suicide in 1945.) .