The Interpreters. London: Macmillan, 1922. First Edition. Pp viii, 180, uncut. Original navy cloth, titled in gilt. In publisher’s dust jacket printed in black with device to upper cover. A very good copy.

Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: “To my friend Mrs Childers, My politics I could never explain in speech. I can only attempt an explanation in writing. Perhaps you will understand better what is in my heart if you can ever find time to read this.”

Mary Alden Childers (nee Osgood) married fellow Irish writer and nationalist, Erskine Childers. She was central to the July 1914 Irish Volunteers Howth gun-running on her and her husband’s yacht Asgard. A photograph taken at the time with fellow-sailor Mary Spring Rice shows her beside the rifles and ammunition boxes. The death by firing squad of her husband  on November 24th, 1922, aged 52, was one of the most high-profile and controversial executions of the Civil War. Childers had taken the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, although he had been part of the delegation that had signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921.

Russell’s first novel, which he says in the preface: “may be taken as a symposium between scattered portions of one nature dramatically sundered as the soul is in dream”