Beschreibung:

WAUGH, Evelyn (1903-66). Helena. London: Chapman & Hall, 1950. 8° (260 x 173mm). Half title (small spot in lower margin of dedication and contents leaf). Original white buckram, spine lettered in gilt (spine a little darkened, sides a little finger-soiled), uncut. Provenance : Christie's New York sale, 18 May 1989, lot 240. FIRST EDITION, one of an unspecified number (probably between 50 and 100) OF SPECIAL LARGER PAPER COPIES on hand-made paper for private distribution, THE DEDICATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR TO LADY PENELOPE BETJEMAN on front free endpaper: "Penelope Stabularia with love from Evelyn, Oct 1 s t 1950"; the printed dedication is "To Penelope Betjeman". Waugh's book is an overtly doctrinal Catholic historical novel about St. Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, whose Edict of Milan in 313 allowed Christians freedom of religion. In her later years Helena became a zealous Christian and in legend is credited with discovering the actual cross on which Christ was crucified. Waugh's dedication of Helena to Lady Betjeman was in honour of her conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1958. "Evelyn enjoyed another close friendship which was largely founded on religious preoccupations, with John and Penelope Betjeman ... He yearned for John to be converted from Anglo-Catholicism to the Roman Catholic Church, and urged this step upon him in the course of a long correspondence which increased in intensity during the immediate post-war years ... These exhortations were fruitless, but Penelope, quite independently, after long and varied study, and under no persuasion from anyone else was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1948. The only religious correspondence between her and Evelyn was after her conversion ... A large part of their correspondence before this had been on horses and harness ... In her young days in Britain St. Helena, according to Evelyn, had had a passion for horses, riding and hunting, and ... she first met her husband Constantinus Chlorus in one of King Cole's harness rooms. All the information which Evelyn needed for these scenes, apart from that stored in his memory from the old days of Captain Hance, was supplied by Penelope ... a passionate horse-woman. When the book was published in 1950, Evelyn kept a promise made to Penelope in 1947, and dedicated it to her [Waugh had begun the book in 1945]. He told me and other friends that the character of Helena was modelled on her" (Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh, a Biography (London, 1975), pp. 329-330).