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RM005
[Prose Manuscript-Juvenilia] Clematisa & Percival

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Mary Webb. Clematisa & Percival. Prose manuscript [ca. 1894–97], thirteen leaves, 8″ x 6¼″, off-white laid ruled paper removed from a notebook. The manuscript is written in ink on rectos only, with a youthful hand and a few small corrections. This story is the earliest known manuscript by Mary Webb and was first published as the second volume of Mary Webb: Neglected Genius (New York: Grolier Club, 2009). The adolescent Mary may have written this charming fairy tale—telling of the kidnapping of the heroine Clematisa (named after the Clematis flower) by the Dandelion Fairy, and of Clematisa’s rescue from a dandelion-covered moon by a prince named Percival—in order to amuse her five siblings, who were from six to thirteen years her junior. The verso of the last leaf contains geometrical drawings. With handwritten documentation from Webb’s husband, Henry Bertram Law Webb, dated 18 November 1936, confirming that it is “an authentic work . . . written in her handwriting at the age of 15 or 16.” Provenance: H. B. L. Webb and H. B. Vander Poel.