Young Emma

London, U.K. : Jonathan Cape, 1980 With a foreword by the English historian C.V. Wedgwood who worked at Cape. Tight Copy. No internal markings, clean text pages. Original dustjacket - price clipped. At the age of 50 towards the end of the First World War, the poet W.H. Davies decided it was time for him to effect a change in his life-style and to seek a wife who would share a new life in the country. With disarming honesty, not to say bluntness as to the acts, yet with humour and delicacy, Davies records his trial runs with three women before he finally meets Emma, then pregnant, as she alights from a bus in the Edgware Road. He describes with beguiling innocence the love that develops before calamity overtakes them. When Jonathan Cape first received the manuscript in 1924, he feared that its publication might damage Davies' reputation. At Davies' death in 1940 Cape tried to publish it again but were advised against publication. In 1979, Davies' widow (Emma) died and Cape were finally free to publish the book. The historian C.V. Wedgwood in her foreword to this edition says that Davies' text has had a 60 year history almost as bizarre as Davies' own story of Emma. This is a bizarre but true love story written poignantly by the poet W.H. Davies.