PORTRAIT IN MOSAIC OF ANN CLIFTON FIRTH

by Mona Gordon

Ann Clifton Firth (1837-1905)

Pegasus Press - 1973

113 pages

h/c with d/j - approx 22cm x 14cm - slight shelf-wear to d/j - no inscriptions

from d/j: This new book by Mona Gordon is a study of her grandmother, whose memory, she recalls, "is sweet as the lingering perfume of rose-leaves". The author writes in the introduction: "Only her own period could have produced her, and her life spanned the reign of Victoria and exceeded it by a bare four years. It is almost unrecorded: sometimes the story proceeds along the delicate tissue of a ribband, a treasured scrap of century-old dress, a piece of jewellery, a diary impersonal as the weather it records." It is also a portrait of a vanished New Zealand and a vanished way of life...

CONTENTS:

• Trial and Error
• Seven Years
• A Girl in Early Auckland
• Decade: the 1860s
• Life at Clifton a Century Ago
• From Gold to Black in the 1880s
• The Shadowed 'Nineties'
• 'Eight Sad Years' Index

• please feel free to ask questions
• sorry no overseas buyers
• happy to combine postage (please advise if you require tracking)