Come, My Coach!

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1935. First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [nice tight clean copy, with only minimal shelfwear; jacket bright and attractive, minor soiling, small stain at rear foldover]. Novel about "a lovely American woman, no longer in her youth, who suddenly found herself living through a great and passionate romance that made her want to give up everything she had." Set in an old French town on the Mediterranean coast. Wor"From the top of her carefully waved hair to the tips of her expensive French pumps, Mrs. Taylor is as representative of a certain class of American women as Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt is of a type of American business man. Her life is filled with the usual round of unimportant engagements, but following her husband's death she feels something is lacking, a feeling which even a trip to Paris and an orgy of shopping cannot quite dispel. This story covers a year in the life of Mrs. Taylor and shows what happens to such a woman on becoming a widow." Uncommon novel by this journalist/author, who turned out quite a few novels (almost all with female protagonists) in the 1920s and 1930s, and was a kind of minor Lost Generation expatriate, due in part to her relationship with the notorious occultist/journalist/traveller/alcoholic William Seabrook. (They were married from 1935 to 1941, and she ultimately wrote a book about him, twenty years after he committed suicide in 1945.) .