Millicent Garrett Fawcett : Official Presentation Copy

The First UK printing published by John Murray in 1931. The BOOK is in Very Good condition. The usually encountered mottling and ghosting to the spine and less so the covers. This book is notorious for the boards ghosting. Light rubbing at the corners and the lower edges in places. The binding remains tight. Some light spotting to the text-block and prelims. Free from inscriptions and erasures. The thin paper WRAPPER is complete and is in Very Good condition with a little loss at the spine ends. Some professional Japanese tissue repairs to the verso which do not show through to the front. A little marking in places. The wrapper is extremely scarce and looks very striking in the removable Brodart archival protector. A presentation printed bookplate to the front pastedown : 'Presented by Miss Agnes Garrett in memory of her sister Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett'. Very few copies were issued with the special presentation plates but of those that do, some have a presentation label reading, 'Presented by Miss Agnes Garrett in memory of her mother Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett'. The printer clearly misidentifying their relationship as Millicent, had only one child, Phillipa. Millicent and Phillipa went on to live with Agnes Garrett after Henry Fawcett's death in 1884. This copy unlike the others, has the correct presentation plate details. Agnes Garrett was an English suffragist and an acclaimed interior designer who was the founder in 1888 of the Ladies Dwellings Company. Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett GBE was a British intellectual, political leader, activist and writer. A feminist icon, she is primarily known for her work as a campaigner for women's suffrage. In February 2018, Fawcett was announced as the winner of the BBC Radio 4 poll for the most influential woman of the past 100 years. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, a statue of Fawcett by Gillian Wearing was erected in Parliament Square, London. The book is dedicated to 'all the men and women who were the comrades of Millicent Garrett Fawcett in the women's suffrage cause'. Ray Strachey came from a liberal, artistic family which had close ties with the Bloomsbury group. She campaigned and wrote extensively on women's suffrage, and later stood as an independent for Brentford and Chiswick for three general elections before becoming the parliamentary secretary for the UK's first female MP, Nancy Astor, and then the head of the Women's Employment Federation. Her papers are held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics. An extremely scarce title to find in any collectible condition more-so with such attributes. More images available on request. Ashton Rare Books welcomes direct contact.