The Light That Failed
NY: Doubleday, Page & Company for Review of Reviews, 1914. 1st Edition Thus. Hardcover_cloth. 5.5"x7.5". 339 pgs. Authorized Edition. Red cloth boards. Blindstamped on front w/hindu swastika symbol in circle w/cursive author's name. Doubleday colophon blindstamped on spine. Raised ribs that are flattened on spine w/gilt letters. Date on title page. Spine straight, binding tight, pages clean w/slight tone from age. Not x-library and unmarked. Mild shelf wear w/light soiling to back cover. Mild edge wear. Collectible - Near Fine. Item #13144
In 1/1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but led to firm friendships & provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co., published years later. During his time there, he met & fell in love with Florence Garrard, the model for Maisie in his 1st novel, The Light That Failed, initially published in 1890 in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.
Dick Heldar is a war correspondent & an artist, known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist & encounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. They fall in love. Then he learns that a minor problem with his eyes is actually the onset of blindness, incurable--the result of a head wound he took during the war. As his vision fails, the light of everything around him--his life, his hopes, his dreams--fail with it. There are terrible choices to be made between the love of the woman he treasures & the love of the men who stood by him at the front. From Goodreads.
Price: $800.00