IN GUIANA WILDS: A STUDY OF TWO WOMEN. Boston: L. C. Page and Company (Incorporated), 1899. Octavo, pp. [1-8] 9-270 [271] [272: blank] [1]-12: ads, inserted frontispiece with illustration by Schmitt, title page printed in red and black, original pictorial tan cloth, front panel stamped in green, light blue and gold, spine panel stamped in gold. First U.S. edition. Allan Gordon, a teenage clerk in British Guiana, fresh from Scotland, gets lost in the forest and is rescued by Chloe, a beautiful 16-year-old half-breed girl. She takes him out next day as his guide but they become stranded in the forest after dark and must spend the night together. The inevitable occurs and Allan pledges to do the right thing and marry her. Marriage, inevitably, brings conflicts as their true characters are revealed: she is a virago, he a bit of a weakling. Next come debt, scandal, ruin and Allan's flight from town into the interior of the country and the company of the Indians. There he meets the lovely Yariko, who nurses him back from fever. Before long, they are married and living together. Where Chloe was passionate and volatile, Yariko is cool and steady. The last third of the book turns to adventure, driven forward by the scheme of Allan's father-in-law, Saranang, to become leader of all the tribes. One scene of an extended drunken orgy culminates in the murder of several drunken Indians as they drink from a trough of just-brewed liquor: the blood from their bashed-in skulls mixes with the liquor and this mixture is eagerly quaffed by Saranang, who invites the others to join him in this unholy communion. At the end of the novel, the author promises a sequel which does not appear to have been published. A bit risqué‚ for its time in the frank treatment of sexuality un-sanctioned by Christian marriage. A well-informed exploration of anthropological and psychological issues. Rodway, the most authoritative of the country's historians and one of it's most prominent residents, wrote a number of nonfiction works about Guiana including a three-volume HISTORY OF BRITISH GUIANA (1891-1894), HANDBOOK OF BRITISH GUIANA (1893), and others. Cloth a bit dusty, endpapers show some foxing, old Anniston, Alabama, youth center stamps on paste-downs, a sound, good copy. (#113066).
Price: $75.00
No statement of printing on copyright page.