First edition. Rebecca West’s substantial two-volume masterpiece documenting her journey to Yugoslavia ostensibly on a trip for the British Council with her husband in 1937. During their six week trip, the pair visited Croatia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro, and the publication of the book coincided with the Nazi Invasion of Yugoslavia.

Part travelogue, part history, and part love story to a country in the process of substantial change, West’s thousand page epic is a striking and poignant recording of the country in pre-war days, dedicated “To Friends in Yugoslavia Who Are Now All Dead or Enslaved.” The endpapers show the chronology of the author’s journey in red ink on a map of the region. 

Rebecca West had first visited Yugoslavia in 1936, when she was sent as a lecturer by the newly formed British Council, first to the Baltic states, and then to Yugoslavia. Though she endured sexual harassment and serious illness in Yugoslavia, she returned twice to collect material for what would later become ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’, and she describes her experiences of the country as "like picking up a strand of wool that would lead me out of a labyrinth in which, to my surprise, I had found myself immured."

“Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is, along with everything else, a great flood of ideas. As with Lawrence it is impossible to say where sensation stops and cogitation begins. Observation and metaphysics, thought and responsiveness to “the visibility of life”, are all the time flowing into each other.” (Geoff Dyer, The Guardian, 2006) 

8vo., 2 vols; original green publisher’s cloth, ruled in blind to upper boards; lettered in gilt to backstrips; decorative map endpapers in red and black; together in the original unclipped publisher’s dust wrappers, printed in black and red; (42s net the set); pp. [vi], vii-xi, [i], 653, [iii]; [iv], v-vii, [i], 586, [ii]; with 32 black and white photographs throughout; a very good set; boards lightly rubbed at edges and pushed at spine tips; endpapers lightly browned and offset; the jackets marginally toned, with some rubbing, creasing and darkening along the backstrip; some small nicks and chips to spine tips and folds; lovely copies, otherwise, and totally unrestored.