Estate / Collection: The Collection of Erica Jong and Ken Burrows

FIELDING, HENRY
Love in Several Masques. A Comedy, As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal, By His Majesty's Servants. London: John Watts, 1728. First edition. Nineteenth-century calf, gilt, rebacked preserving old spine. 7 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches (18.5 x 11.25 cm); [8], [1-3] 4-82, [1] pp. A few spots of wear to the corners, rebacked, contents lightly spotted and toned, trimmed, occasionally touching the headlines, bookplates of Viscount Birkenhead and Louis C. Asher.

The first edition of Henry Fielding's first play, which opened on February 16th,1728 at The Royal Theatre in Drury Lane. Fielding was an important influence on Erica Jong's novels - Isadora Wing, the uninhibited protagonist of Jong's classic novel, Fear of Flying, has often been compared to Fielding's Tom Jones ("is it her heart that is driving her? Or, like Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, is she allowing a different part of her anatomy to make her decisions?") and she also wrote a novel set in Fielding's era, Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, which explores the question of what if Tom Jones had been a woman more directly (cf. Jong, Erika. Fear of Flying, Penguin 40th Anniversary Edition, foreward by Theresa Rebeck, p. xiii). Cross, Vol. III, p. 290.