Gallantry

James Branch Cabell

ago 2021 · Graphic Arts Books

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Gallantry (1922) is a collection of comic fantasy tales by James Branch Cabell. Set in a fictionalized version of 18th century England, Gallantry is a relative outlier among Cabell’s body of work, and is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. “We begin at a time when George the Second was permitting Ormskirk and the Pelhams to govern England, and the Jacobites had not yet ceased to hope for another Stuart Restoration, and Mr. Washington was a promising young surveyor in the most loyal colony of Virginia.” Moving away from his usual setting of 13th century France, Cabell transports his favorite themes of aristocratic life and romance to the tumultuous world of 18th century England. As the country rebuilds following a period of civil war, famine, and disease, its wealthy elite enjoy an existence of ease at Tunbridge Wells, a legendary spa town on the outskirts of London. Gallantry is a captivating collection of tales from a historical period not so different from our own. Cabell’s work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read Gallantry, however, is to understand that the issues therein—the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women—were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of James Branch Cabell’s Gallantry is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.

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James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.