New York: Century, 1931. (vi), 365, [3] pp, brown cloth lettered in orange. Small Toronto bookstore stamp and small ink digits on front endpapers, date stamps to rear endpaper, orange topstain faded, three small greenish spots on rear cover, very good otherwise. Price-clipped dust jacket has small chips, short tears, to spine tips and outer corners; crease to front flap; small rubber stamped Canadian price beside the flap clip; VG otherwise. The noted translator's uncommon first novel, published the same year as the London edition. Set in a small town on the east coast of Scotland, it examines its conventions and restrictions, especially pertaining to women. "Willa Muir [was] one of the finest and fiercest intellectuals of her generation. Her writing is rich with paradox - although obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she resented Scotland; although a trenchant champion of feminism, she voluntarily sacrificed her identity to that of the poet's wife ; and although she was a committed reformer, she never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. These passionate dichotomies are intertwined in her writing, giving a particular power to her fiction and non-fiction alike." - from the 1987 reprint in the Canongate classics series.