Cabell Anniversary - Sept 1913 - Sept 2013

Next month it will be one hundred years since the publication of The Soul of Melicent, Cabell's first novel to take place in Poictesme. It was also the first to feature a member of Dom Manuel's immediate family, Melicent being one of his three daughters. and sister to Ettarre (Cream of the Jest) and Dorothy la Desiree (Jurgen). When Soul of Melicent was revised and reissued in 1920 it was retitled Domnei.

Bring out the champagne!

Not much of a drinker; if I were younger I'd bring out the hash-pipe.

Domnei may be a bit old fashioned and is only marginally fantastic by comparison with Cabell's later fantasies, but I think it's under-rated. Soooo romantic!

Break out the cold cream!

>3 Crypto-Willobie: Though he did not live to see it published, I think Mark Twain would agree as he was a huge fan of Cabell's early romances.

"....The early work attracted some praise. Mark Twain himself described the stories in Chivalry as "masterpieces ... wonderfully well written." (Quoted in letter from Eugene Saxton to Cabell, 1920.) But it was typical of Cabell to use his most negative reviews as end-matter advertisements in a later book -- for example, assembling several notices of The Soul of Melicent which conveyed that Howard Pyle's coloured illustrations were the best part of the book, and adding demurely: "This Comedy is now issued without illustrations."

(from the US Dictionary of Literary Biography volume 20th Century American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers, 1900-1950 ed. F. Brett Cox)

http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/dlb-cabell.html