The Violins of Saint Jacques: A Tale of the Antilles.

First edition of the first and only novel. Octavo, original publisher's cloth, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with black and white sketches. Association copy, inscribed by Leigh Fermor to Daphne Fielding in the year of publication with original drawings on the front free endpaper, "À l’honorable Daphne Fielding et au commandant Alex, avec les hommages et l’amitié de Berthe de Rennes. Akrotírion, Mytilène, déc. 1953." The recipient, Daphne Fielding was a British socialite and writer whose memoirs and biographical works offered a vivid portrait of aristocratic life in the early twentieth century. Born Daphne Vivian, daughter of the 4th Baron Vivian, she married Henry Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath, and became Marchioness of Bath before their divorce in 1953. Fielding was closely connected to the “Bright Young Things”—a group of bohemian aristocrats and artists whose flamboyant lifestyles captured public imagination in interwar Britain—and maintained friendships with many prominent literary figures, including Patrick Leigh Fermor. Their friendship developed within overlapping Anglo-aristocratic and expatriate literary circles, particularly in postwar Greece, where both spent extended periods and moved among diplomats, writers, and former military figures. Though Leigh Fermor was not aristocratic by birth, his wartime exploits and literary reputation granted him entry into the same cultivated social world, and the two shared an attachment to Greece as well as a concern with recording aspects of a vanishing European order—Fielding through memoirs of British high society, and Leigh Fermor through his historically inflected travel writing—suggesting a relationship grounded in intellectual affinity, shared geography, and mutual social networks rather than romance. Additionally signed by Leigh Fermor on the title page. Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. An exceptional association.