Rosemary Tonks: 'Wild Sea Goose', London, John Murray, 1951,...

Hammer

£32

Rosemary Tonks: 'Wild Sea Goose', London, John Murray, 1951, 1st edition, b/w ills. by the author throughout, original cloth. The author's second published book, preceding her poetry and novels. Rosemary Tonks (1928-2014) was a writer from childhood. "Miss Bushman-Caldicott", a story she wrote while at school, was broadcast on BBC radio in 1946. Her first published book, On Wooden Wings: The Adventures of Webster, which she also illustrated, followed in 1948. Between 1963 and 1974, she published two epoch-defining poetry collections and six acerbic, satirical novels. Living in Hampstead and mixing with socialite writers such as Dame Edith Sitwell, a near-neighbour, Tonks became the toast of London's literary parties, one of very few published female poets of that time. She collaborated with Delia Derbyshire, the iconic early electronic musician who helped create the “Doctor Who” theme, and Alexander Trocchi, the novelist and famed junkie, on cutting-edge “sound poems.” Yet the literary world both attracted and repelled her, and she was to turn against its materialism, false values, betrayals and indulgence, as she was to follow Rimbaud in renouncing literature itself, when after a series of misfortunes and crises she unexpectedly converted fundamentalist Christianity and disappeared from public life. In 1980 she left London for Bournemouth, where she was known as Mrs. Lightband; she made anonymous appearances in the city to pass out Bibles at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. She felt a calling to protect the public from the sinfulness of her own writing by burning her manuscripts, actively preventing republication in her lifetime, and destroying evidence of her career. There are tales of her systematically checking out her own books from libraries across England in order to burn them in her back garden. Very scarce