Elena

Houghton Mifflin. Near Fine in Very Good dust jacket. 1986. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. 0395356326 . HC/DJ - near fine/VG. Pages and hardcover are clean and unmarked, bumping to spine ends and slight tanning to spine ends, light soiling upper edge of pages. Dustjacket has tannning to spine and edges, light edge wear and a few tiny edge tears, not clipped. ; Large 8vo 9" - 10" tall; 435 pages; "Elena is a leisurely, elegant novel in the form of a biography, the story of an esteemed American novelist, a reclusive intellectual whose life was an exquisitely "considered" one. Born in 1910 in Standhope, Connecticut, to a "wandering father" and a mother who died insane, Elena Franklin won acclaim in New York as the young author of New England Maid. Her love affair with a left-wing journalist in the 1930s and her book about the Depression; expatriation in Paris; and her later years with her last lover, Southern historian Jason Findley, are the facts of a life less defined by events than by the deliberate development of a consciousness. After Elena's death and the publication of her biography, her older brother William, also a writer, tells the real story of her legendary life and the "invisible solitude that held her," a nostalgic narrative that reflects 70 years of social and literary history." (760, 0211) .