Skinner (M.L.) Black Swans.

Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
London, Jonathan Cape, 1925.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.

“A rare bird upon the earth, and most like a black swan” (Juvenal)

Mollie Skinner was the Quaker nurse who, with a friend, ran the Darlington guesthouse where D.H. Lawrence and Frieda stayed on their 1922 Australian visit, a lodging arrangement with consequences: Lawrence took her manuscript about immigrant life in 1880s Western Australia, rewrote it as their joint novel The Boy in the Bush (1924), and remained her advocate afterwards, his letters from Mexico tracking the progress of Black Swans – her first solo novel under her own name – to press with Cape, while Frieda wrote urging her not to mind the critics.