RECOLLECTIONS OF A HAPPY LIFE

BEING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARIANNE NORTH.

Edited by her sister Mrs. John Addington Symonds.

Fourth impression, with corrections 1893. 2 volumes: I. vii, 351. II. 343 pages, frontispiece portraits of the author in each volume, 1 plate of the "Marianne North" Gallery in the Royal Gardens at Kew, 2 double-page maps of the world, 2 other maps - 1 of South Africa, original green cloth titled gilt on the spines and with gilt vignettes of plants on the upper covers - some insect damage of the cloth particularly at the bottom edge of volume II, edges uncut, bookplates on the front free endpapers, contents good.

'...Marianne North has been publicly enshrined in England for over a century as one of the significant artifacts of the Nineteenth-century British culture. She was a confirmed spinster, a woman whose life had nothing to do with those conventional female patterns - in life and in novels, of heterosexual romance and domesticity. A North herself commented, "I prefer vegetables." North spend five decades travelling. The last fourteen years of that time she went to all the continents outside Europe painting pictures everywhere she went. Her impartial desire to cover the territory led her to Africa because she had no paintings of  plants from that continent. She set our for Australia because Charges Darwin told her it shouldn't e missed.. North did not stop travelling until she was almost fifty-five and too ill to brave the tropics any more.' From the Introduction to the new edition published by University of Virginia Press in 1993, edited by Susan Morgan.