Bath

Edition: 1st ed.,

Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Tanning and foxing

Few English cities have inspired as much elegance, intrigue, and literary imagination as Bath, and in Bath, Edith Sitwell captures the city's golden age with her signature blend of wit, erudition, and poetic sensibility. The book chronicles the rise of Bath as the supreme social capital of eighteenth-century England, painting vivid portraits of the fashionable crowds who flocked to its famous waters, presided over by the inimitable arbiter of taste, Beau Nash. Sitwell illuminates the rituals of promenade and pump room, the glittering assemblies, the gossip and gambling, and the elaborate theatre of manners that defined Georgian society at its most spectacular. Written with the lush, imageistic prose that distinguishes Sitwell as one of the twentieth century's most distinctive literary voices, Bath is as much a work of cultural history as it is an act of imaginative resurrection. She argues persuasively that the city itself was a kind of living artwork — a stage upon which England's aristocracy and nouveaux riches performed their ambitions and desires. Rich in historical detail yet animated by Sitwell's irreverent and deeply personal intelligence, this work leaves the reader wondering whether such a magnificent confluence of architecture, society, and spectacle could ever be conjured again.