Favourite Poems by Gifted Bards. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin [nd]

(175 x 230 mm) pp. vii, 82 + 2 p publisher’s ads. Half title. Each page illustrated, and embellished with a border. Prize plate from “The Edinburgh Institution for the Education of Young Ladies 1 Park Place” dated 1871-1872, 39^th session. Green publisher’s binding with gilt, black, and purple decoration. Binding has some water damage. Gilt fore-edges. Back cover has Edinburgh Institution prize stamped in gilt. Some splitting between front cover. Overall GOOD condition.

This book was issued as a prize by the Edinburgh Institution for the Education of Young Ladies, which had been then recently renamed from the Merchan Maiden Hospital in 1870. The year that the book was presented to Catherine Furley, her school had moved to Queen Street, in Edinburgh, and was colloquially called the Queen Street School. In 1889, it underwent another renaming, as the Edinburgh Ladies’ College, and the year that Catherine Furley died, in 1944, the current name was arrived upon: the Mary Erskin School.

Catherine Grant Furley Smith (1858-1944) was a poet, a novelist, and a journalist. She wrote two novels after leaving Edinburgh to relocate to London in 1887, “Quixote, the Weaver” and “An Unsought Heritage”. She wrote for “The Hospital,” a journal on health care and health care institutions, which began in 1886 and ran until 1921 at which time the name, much like Catherine’s school’s, was changed. She appears to have published under the name Kate Furley, and in March 1887, a serial fiction piece, titled “Nurse Marion’s Romance.”

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