Is She a Lady? A Problem in Autobiography - Nina Hamnett 1955 - Allan Windgate, London - First Edition A rare dust jacketed first edition of Nina Hamnett’s second autobiographical work, the first being ‘A Laughing Torso’ [1933], and published only a year before her death.

Although more famous as the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ in Paris and written about first and foremost as a subject for the art of others (from Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to Roger Fry to Walter Sickert, ), she was a well trained and versatile artist in her own right and one of few emerging female artists of the first half of the 20th century.

‘Reading her story as a tale of the emergence of a young woman into the modern art world, her writing – breathless as it can be – creates a pithy, vivid and often amusing picture of what it felt like to throw off the constraints of the Edwardian lady and reinvent yourself as an artist’ - Alicia Foster, Art UK.

Illustrated with seven photographs and six reproductions of her drawings, including one of Anthony Powell from 1927.

Beginning in 1926, Nina Hamnett ‘
proceeds to unleash a reckless Niagara of hilarious anecdotes and preposterous incidents of the vintage Bohemian life of London and Paris in the late twenties and early thirties. This was a world of pubs and clubs and parties, of painters, patrons, poets, boxers and tarts, of champagne drunk with the rich, quiet visits to the pawnshop and studio free-for-alls...’
  Octavo (book size 22.2x14.6cm), pp. 161 [3]. In publisher’s blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Dust jacket priced ‘12s 6d net’ to lower edge of front flap.   Condition: Near fine, gentle foxing to edges and first and last few pages, in very good dust jacket, wear to corners, heavier to tail of spine and front corners, rubbing to front panel.   Ref: 110911   Price: HK$ 5,000