Autograph postcard signed by Louis Golding to scholar John Ellingham Brooks 1924

GOLDING, Louis (1895-1958). Autograph picture postcard signed to John Ellingham Brooks, Eryx, Sicily, 28 April 1924.

Original picture postcard, 140x90mm, illustrated with a view of the Castello Pepoli at Monte San Giuliano, now Erice. Written in black ink across the address side and signed "L.G.", with Italian postage stamp and postal cancellations. Light marking and edge wear, with pencil annotations to the upper margin. Very good.

A literary postcard to the classical scholar John Ellingham Brooks (1863-1929), resident on Capri. Golding describes following Samuel Butler's footsteps from Calatafimi to Trapani and finally Eryx, invoking "Nausicaa authoress of the Odyssey, secondo lui". This refers to Butler's theory, advanced in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), that the poem was written by a young Sicilian woman at Trapani.

Golding continues with reflections on the ruined shrines and their "alas-dead moon-shattering orgies", before contrasting the ancient goddess Astaroth with the local Madonna and a miraculous rescue recorded in an ex-voto. Written the year before the publication of his travel book Sicilian Noon (1925).

Brooks was an early intimate and literary influence on W. Somerset Maugham and subsequently a close associate of E. F. Benson within the expatriate circle on Capri.