Indian pageant

London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1942. Original publisher's pale-yellow cloth lettered in red, with the decorative unclipped dust wrapper. Small nick to front board, otherwise crisp. Wrapper a little creased and frayed without major loss. With the ink presentation inscription to FFEP 'For Henry from Francis, 16 ou '42. for ornament, not for reading, sweepe the last chapter, perhaps.' Major Francis Charles Claypon Yeats-Brown, (1886-1944) was a British Army Officer who won the James Tait Black memorial prize for his memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer in 1930. Yeats-Brown first wrote to Williamson on the publication of The Story of a Norfolk Farm in 1941, and the two continued a close friendship until Yeats-Brown's death in 1944. A character based on Yeats-Brown appears in Williamson's Lucifer Before Sunrise, published in 1967. Henry Williamson (1895-1977), novelist and writer on natural history and the English countryside, is predominantly remembered as the author of Tarka the Otter (1927) for which he won the Hawthornden Prize. His wartime experiences on the Western Front having altered his life inexorably, he spent the remainder of his post-war life in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, writing naturalistic novels very much in the romantic tradition. . First edition. 8vo.