May 23, 2024 - Sale 2670

Sale 2670 - Lot 36

Price Realized: $ 500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 500
Atwood, Margaret (b. 1939)
The Edible Woman.

Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1969.

First American edition, octavo; bound in publisher's pink half cloth with yellow paper-covered boards, blind stamped, gilt lettered spine; with pictorial dust jacket illustrated by John Alcorn, unclipped (minor stain to foot edge, jacket rubbed with some edgewear, mostly at spine head and upper corners where aged tape reinforcements were made to verso); 8 1/4 x 5 1/2 in.

Best known for her groundbreaking novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the present is Atwood's very first novel, establishing her as one of the greatest prose writers of the century. Her exploration of gender roles and consumerism in The Edible Woman was in stride with the emerging North American women's movement at the time of its release. In the introduction Atwood notes that she began this work, "there was no feminist movement in sight, [...] and I'm not gifted with clairvoyance, though like many at the time I'd read Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir behind locked doors."