In a North Country Village

London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co, 1893. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. First Edition. Hardcover. SCARCE. M. E. Francis was the pen name of Mary Elizabeth (Sweetman) Blundell (1859-1930), who was a prolific Irish novelist. The Sweetman family were landed gentry in Ireland, but after her father's death when she was a child the family moved to Brussels. She married Colonel Francis Nicholas Blundell, from a notable English Catholic family and settled in the small English village of his family's estate. This is her first collection of short fiction, a dozen stories of rural life in the fictional town of Thornleigh in the north of England. Small octavo. Blue-green cloth-covered boards with gilt author and title to spine and red and gilt ornament to front cover. Bumping to corners and spine. Interior pages clean. 301 pages. LIT/031511.