Ariadne. A Play in Three Acts and Poems by Rich, Adrienne Cecile - 1939

[Baltimore: Privately Printed by the J. H. Furst Company], 1939. First edition. 59 pp, on laid paper watermarked "Hamilton Kilmory". 8vo. Original printed wrappers, glassine dust jacket. Slight toning to lower margin of wrappers, otherwise a fine copy, housed in red half morocco slipcase and cloth chemise. First edition. 59 pp, on laid paper watermarked "Hamilton Kilmory". 8vo. Her first book, published at age 10. First edition of the poet's extremely rare first book, privately printed by her parents when she was just ten years old.
Adrienne Rich's father was the head of the pathology department at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her mother was a concert pianist and composer. Rich was home-schooled until she entered fourth grade, and her first two books - Ariadne and Not I, But Death - are a testament to the mixed blessing of her birth and upbringing, the special care and tutelage of her parents, her father's fierce ambition for his daughter, and his pride in her precocious promise. Rich would disown both books.
In 1971, in her essay "When We Dead Awaken", Rich wrote: "My own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I was indeed 'special.' The obverse of this, of course, was that I tried for a long time to please him, or rather, not to displease him." - from Arts of the Possible. Essays and Conversations. (N. Y.: Norton, 2001) p. 15.
In her essay, "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity", Rich reflected at greater length on her relationship with her father: "My father was an amateur musician, read poetry, adored encyclopedic knowledge. He prowled and pounced over my school papers, insisting I use 'grown-up' sources; he criticized my poems for faulty technique and gave me books on rhyme and meter and form. His investment in my intellect and talent was egotistical, tyrannical, opinionated, and terribly wearing. He taught me, nevertheless, to believe in hard work, to mistrust easy inspiration, to write and rewrite; to feel that I was a person in the book, even though a woman; to take ideas seriously. He made me feel, at a very young age, the power of language and that I could share in it." Reflecting on her relationship with her father, Rich realized its nature, its costs and consequences: "I wanted him to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and made her own choices. This, I finally realized, was not to be; Arnold demanded absolute loyalty, absolute submission to his will. In my separation from him, in my realization at what price that once-intoxicating approval had been bought, I was learning in concrete ways a great deal about patriarchy, in particular how the 'special' woman, the favored daughter, is controlled and rewarded." - "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity" (1982), in Blood, Bread and Poetry. Selected Prose 1979-1985. (N.Y.: Norton, 1994), pp. 113, 116.
Neither book is generally known - and Rich does not mention either book in her most personal essays about her early life - and most bibliographies of Rich's work do not mention them. It is a measure of their obscurity that Amy Sickels, in her study of Adrienne Rich in the Gay and Lesbian Writers Series (Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 2005), devotes a chapter to "A Father's Ambition", and fails to mention either of these publications; nor are they mentioned in her Chronology of Rich's life or in the list of Rich's Works. Discussions of Rich's work invariably begin with her first published work, A Change of World, which W. H. Auden selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award during Rich's last year at Radcliffe, and Rich's own Collected Early Poems dates from 1950. Scholars, in other words, either are not aware of these works or appear to have followed the author's desire that her juvenile work be forgotten. The most recent biography, The Power of Adrienne Rich, by Hillary Holladay, makes no mention of the books.
We have no record of the number of copies printed, and given the rarity of Ariadne and Not I, But Death, it may well be that the author destroyed any remaining copies of them in later years. Both titles are extremely rare; no copies have appeared at auction, and only a small number are recorded in institutional collections.