The New Review: A Complete Run in 17 Volumes (1889-97) by (CONRAD, Joseph, H. Rider Haggard, Kenneth Grahame, Henry James, W.N.P. Nicholson, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, and Others) - 1889

London: (Longmans, Green and Co. / William Heinemann, 1889. Hardcover. Very Good. Magazine. 17 volumes. Large octavos. Edited by Archibald Grove and William Ernest Henley. A complete set of *The New Review* consisting of all of the monthly issues published from June, 1889 (issue no. 1) through December 1897, when it ceased publication. Bound without wrappers in full cloth over boards, with dark red leather spine labels stamped in gold, edges sprinkled red. An ex-library set with intermittent small ink stamps and bookplates on the front pastedowns. Modest overall soiling and some scattered light staining to the cloth bindings, two folded plates in volume 17 are split along the fold, overall very good. A complete run of this influential avant-garde magazine that features the first published appearances of many important literary works, most notably H.G. Wells' *The Time Machine*, a landmark science fiction novel that popularized time travel stories and coined the term "time machine," and Joseph Conrad's *The Nigger of the "Narcissus,"* which was completed in the magazine's final issue, along with the author's famous postscript: "Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line." The magazine was unusual because it appealed both to conservative MPs and literary intellectuals, and championed 'uncommercial' writers. Modern critics describe it as an early modernist 'little magazine' in mid-Victorian clothing. A sampling of its content includes *The Solution* by Henry James, and *The World's Desire* by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang. Also included are four stories by Kenneth Grahame (later published in *The Golden Age* and *Dream Days*), three more stories by Wells, poems by Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Paul Verlaine, and poems and stories by W.B. Yeats. The magazine under Grove and Henley also published multiple contributions by several leading women writers, including: Vernon Lee [Violet Page], Olive Schreiner, Ellen Terry, Katharine Tynan, and Sarah Grand; along with multiple essays and reviews by Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Edmund Gosse, George Saintsbury, Walter Pater, and others. Starting in February 1897 the magazine also serialized a revised version of *What Maisie Knew* by Henry James, in direct competition with the version that had commenced publication just two weeks earlier in *The Chap Book*. And all throughout 1897 Henley published seven color woodcut portraits by the avant-garde artist William Nicholson (all folded plates): "a gallery representative of the most unique and influential personalities of our time." Sir Herbert Stephen, one of the magazine's co-owners, blamed *The New Review's* eventual demise in 1897 on Henley's stridently avant-garde literary tastes, and for the publication of a story in which the seduction of a housemaid was described too explicitly. A rare compete set of this important literary journal which was at the forefront of the radical transformation of British literary culture during the 1890s. *Edel and Laurence*, A49 and D480 (Henry James); *Hammond*, p. 46 (H.G. Wells); *McDonald*, p. 49 (*British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914*). A detailed list is available upon request.