Mother Courage

First published in 1670, this picaresque novel is narrated by Courasche, a camp follower of the Thirty Years' War, who tells her life in order to answer the slighting portrait of her in Simplicissimus. Born to a Bohemian officer, she disguises herself as a boy, then lives by marriage, theft, sutling, and shifting sides as armies cross Germany. Husbands and lovers succeed one another; she records rape, profit, and disease without apology. The voice is first-person, comic, and hard. The book is a fictional autobiography of a woman in the war, not Bertolt Brecht's later play that borrowed her name.

Full cream canvas binding with a frieze design in blue by Wegner. Dark red endleaves. Blue-grey slipcase.