After the London edition. Disbound 12mo, 47pp. Good with stab-stitch marks in the gutter, light foxing and discoloration throughout.

An anonymously published response to Rosina Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 novel Cheveley, or, The Man of Honour. Her book was a thinly veiled attack on her husband, embodied in a unfaithful and philandering character who causes a woman to go mad and is tried in court, eventually falling to his death as he tries to escape accountability for his actions. Although Edward Bulwer-Lytton tried desperately to prevent its publication, the book became a sensation, going through three editions in its first year.

Though he denied it at the time of publication, literary historians believe Lady Cheveley was indeed written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The preface decries the work's "immoral tendency, its false and hollow sentiment, coarse and flippant attempts at wit, and its illiterate composition make it an insult to the public taste..." Highly defensive and hypocritical, his footnotes are especially indignant and show he resented not only the content her work, but that she was publishing at all—among the contentions of their marriage, he tried to suppress all her publications. The content also shames her readers:

Is this the land where woman's heart is true?
Daughters of England, blush! for upon you
Shall fall some share of her undying shame,
Whose falsehood would defile a husband's fame !
Yes, while ye smile upon that venomed page,
A lasting blot upon a maudlin age,
Smile while the traitor wife, the fire-side spy,
Weaves the base slander, and the specious lie
(15)

(See King, "Getting Even: The Mighty Pen of Lady Bulwer Lytton")