The Corn King and the Spring Queen.

London: Jonathan Cape,, 1931. Presented to E. M. Forster, her friend and trusted advisor First edition, first impression, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to E. M. Forster on the front free endpaper, with his book label on the front pastedown, "E. M. Forster, with much gratitude & all good wishes, from Naomi Mitchison". Forster read the work in draft and provided feedback from January 1929 onwards. Set in ancient Greece, Egypt, and the lands around the Black Sea, the novel incorporates a fictional magical society with the historical, and explores themes of sexuality and free love that Mitchison herself practised, but which proved provocative at the time of publication. It is "widely agreed to be her finest novel, and perhaps the best historical novel of the 20th century" (Longford). This "breathtaking recreation of life in the ancient world welds the power of myth and magic to a stirring plot" and drew on her interest in myth and ritual enriched by her reading of the writings of James George Frazer (Rankin). Mitchison (1897-1999) was a prolific Scottish author, publishing over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing, and autobiography. Her most controversial work, We Have Been Warned (1935) was explicitly feminist in its support for birth control, for which she was a vocal supporter, and was extensively censored pre-publication. Mitchison was a committed socialist and the present explicitly anti-fascist work has also been read by some as a warning to the Labour party, of which she was a member, on the potential pitfalls and risks for an activist party. She visited the Soviet Union in 1932 as part of a Fabian Society group, and travelled to Austria in 1934, where she helped smuggle documents and left-wing refugees out of the country. Mitchison and Forster were part of a shared literary coterie, their mutually advisory friendship beginning in 1923, when Forster wrote to Mitchison to discuss her first novel, The Conquered. Her and her husband the Labour MP Dick Mitchison's main residence from 1923 to 1939, River Court House, Hammersmith, was a lively intellectual centre frequented by a wide circle of artists, writers, and politicians including Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, and W. H. Auden. The designs in the book are those of Zofia Stryje ska (1891-1976) a Polish painter, graphic designer, illustrator, and stage designer. They were initially used as decorations for the Polish National Pavilion in the Paris Exhibition of 1926. Octavo. Original blue and cream dapple cloth, spine lettered in blue, geometric art deco design to spine and front cover in red, publisher's device in blind to rear cover, bottom edge untrimmed. Printed on onion paper. With 4 black and white illustrations by Zofia Stryjenska. Spine, board edges, and top edge browned, occasional spots of foxing to upper margins, a remarkably well-preserved copy in very good condition indeed. Elizabeth Longford, "Obituary: Naomi Mitchison", The Independent, 13 January 1999; Ian Rankin, review for the Canongate 2010 edition.