Letters of Constance Lytton by her Sister Berry Balfour first edition 1925

[LYTTON, Constance]; BALFOUR, Betty. Letters of Constance Lytton.

London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925.

Octavo, pp. xv, 272, with frontispiece and 16 further photographic plates (17 illustrations in total), including portraits of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Original grey cloth, gilt lettered spine, in the original pictorial dust-wrapper. Contents: generally clean; the photographic plates show pale marginal tide-marking along the left edges, not affecting the images. Contemporary name to the front free end paper. Dust-wrapper: present and complete, with rubbing and softening, and visible water-staining along the folds, spine and verso, but retaining the full portrait panel and all lettering. Overall a good book, with a poor dust wrapper.
 
First edition of the posthumously published correspondence of Lady Constance Lytton, selected and arranged by her sister, Betty Balfour. A central figure of the militant suffrage movement, Lytton is remembered not only for her repeated imprisonments and hunger strikes, but for her deliberate adoption of the working-class alias “Jane Warton” in order to expose differential treatment of suffragette prisoners, an episode documented here and illustrated by the well-known photograph of her in disguise.  Lytton came up with her alter ego using an amalgamation of Joan / Jane of Arc and the surname Warburton, or Warton for short. The letters illuminate both her political commitment and the personal cost of activism, written in the years leading up to the physical collapse that curtailed her public life.
 
The survival of the publisher’s jacket, even in this poor condition, is most uncommon for this title. A key primary-source volume for the militant phase of the British suffrage campaign, and rare with the jacket.