English Eccentrics

First published in 1933, this book is a gallery of historical English oddities rather than a continuous narrative. Sitwell assembles short lives and anecdotes of hermits, collectors, quacks, extravagant peers, religious enthusiasts, and people who invented private worlds of dress, diet, or architecture. She groups them by temperament - the ornamental, the learned, the sporting, the pious - and treats eccentricity as a form of self-made theatre. The sketches move among courts, country houses, and provincial towns from the seventeenth century onward. The work is biographical portraiture and social comedy: a study of how certain men and women refused ordinary conduct.

Quarter bound in dark blue buckram, pale blue paper covers pattern printed in dark green, grey-green and silver with a design by Pym. Pale blue endleaves. Pale blue or dark green slipcase.