All three volumes of Lady Diana Cooper's memoirs, The Rainbow Comes and Goes, The Light of Common Day, and Trumpets from the Steep, each inscribed and signed by the author.
London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958-1960. First edition, mixed impressions. Hardcover. This is a triply inscribed, full, three-volume set of the author's autobiography. The first volume is inscribed in two lines on the half title "Diana Cooper - | 1959-". The second volume is inscribed in five lines on the half title "Here I come again - | be leniant dear | Neil | Diana Cooper | Jan 1977". Diana further wrote on the dedication page "- my sister" beside the printed "TO LETTY". The front free endpaper recto of the third volume is inscribed in four lines "Kitty with | love | from | Diana".
The Light of Common Day and Trumpets from the Steep are both first edition, first impression. The Rainbow Comes and Goes is the second impression, issued in the same year as the first.
Condition of each volume is very good or better, each dust jacket very good minus or better. Each cloth binding is square, tight, and clean, showing minor shelf wear to extremities, with more appreciable lower edge shelf wear to The Light of Common Day. The contents of all three volumes are clean, with no spotting and only minor age-toning. The Rainbow Comes and Goes features an inked name and date – “Betty Neel. | 1959” – on the upper front free endpaper recto. All three dust jackets remain bright and retain their original lower front flap “25s. net” price. All three jackets show various scuffs and blemishes, with general wear and minor loss to joints and extremities. The Rainbow Comes and Goes jacket has two closed tears with attendant wrinkling at the upper front face and the lower right of the spine. The jackets are protected beneath clear, removable, archival covers.
To say that Diana Olivia Winifred Maude Cooper, Viscountess Norwich, known as Lady Diana Cooper, (1892-1986) was an actress, society hostess, and author is accurate in summation, but woefully inadequate. Likewise, Diana’s great beauty often eclipsed her cleverness and sense of humor. Born to privilege – officially to a marquess but possibly fathered by the brother of a Baron – Diana “received no formal education” but “learned much, including great drifts of poetry.” This shaped her prose, which was vivid, and her spelling, which was idiosyncratic.
Diana formally ‘came out’ in 1910 and participated in excess in her so-called “Golden Generation”, which lost much verve and many lives to the First World War. While Diana served as a nurse at Guy’s Hospital, several of her many suitors died in the fighting. Alfred “Duff” Cooper did not, prevailing both in battlefield heroism and against the opposition of Diana’s ambitious mother. They married in June 1919. Duff had told Diana “Bores with God’s help we will never be.” They weren’t.
Acting, where Diana “gained the reputation of a hard-working actress as well as a transcendent beauty”, earned the money that enabled her husband to enter politics. Acting eventually became secondary to her only son’s education and support of her husband’s career. During the 1930s she had “opportunity to display her outstanding talent as a hostess” though she was much more. During the Second World War, she supported her husband’s work in the Government of his friend, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, “even accompanying him to Singapore and the Far East against convention, and in the face of opposition.” Their zenith came when Duff became the first post-war ambassador to France. “With her remarkable ability to get on with people” Diana “collected a group of artists and writers” and “gave the embassy a glamour possessed by none other.”
Duff was created Viscount Norwich in 1952, but “Diana would have none of it, announcing in The Times that she wished to retain her former name and title, so Lady Diana Cooper she remained.” She and Duff had been together for 35 years when he died in 1954. She was “distraught without him” but filled her remaining 32 years with her son, grandchildren, friends, travel, and with the writing of her three-volume autobiography, “which was a resounding success.”
References: ODNB; Ziegler, Diana Cooper; The Times. Item #008854
Price: $450.00