CLARKE, Susanna: JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL. Illustrations by Portia Rosenberg. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. 16 x 24 cm. (8vo), [x], 782, [3]pp, ill. First UK edition, first printing. Double-signed by the author and the illustrator. A very fine copy, tight binding and publisher's variant black cloth, looking fresh and clean, ivory endpapers, purple edges, and white page marker. Inscribed by the author, "To Gerald", dated, "4th October 2004". Complete with a near fine dust wrapper, ever so slightly rubbed at the bottom edge. No tears or fading, no marks or dots. Frontispiece plus illustrations throughout. 'The finest English novel of the fantastic about the myth of England and the myth of the fantastic and the marriage of the two.' — John Clute Susanna Clarke remarkable novel of magic, manners, and mayhem, charts the progress of the eponymous Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, two very different magicians, one scholarly and rational, the other intuitive and daring. Dealing with themes of Englishness, the North-South divide, otherness and class, and infused with a love for Romanticism, Jane Austen, Dickens, and the Gothic, Clarke repositioned fairy stories by creating a whole English mythology separated from Irish and Scottish tropes, hailing back to Shakespeare, Spencer, and more recently Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). Winner of the British Book Award Newcomer of the Year (2005), as well as the Hugo, Locus, Mythopoeic and World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (2005). An extremely rare double-signed first edition/first printing, by the author and also the illustrator, Portia Rosenberg. A graduate from the first cohort of the influential MA in Children’s Book Illustration at Anglia Ruskin University (formerly the Cambridge School of Arts), Rosenberg's illustrated material itself was highly praised by reviewers 'as apt as Edward Gorey's for Dickens' Bleak House.' (Nisi Shawl, The Seattle Times), although her decision not to follow the funny savagery of nineteenth-century illustrators of the period referred by Clarke throughout the text—George Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson—was a matter of some controversy at the time of publication (John Clute, Science Fiction Weekly). This first edition, first printing, double-signed by the author and the illustrator, is extremely rare. £950
