L'Odyséé d'Homere,

Paris: Rigaud,, 1716. The first female translator of Homer First Dacier edition, in a beautiful contemporary French binding decorated with small gilt shell tools. Dacier's celebrated translation into French of the Odyssey is considered her "crowning achievement" (Folger, p. 34) alongside her equally successful translation of the Iliad (1711). The only daughter of the noted Hellenist Tanneguy Lefèvre, Anne Dacier (c.1654-1720) began translating classical works from an early age, beginning with Callimachus and progressing to versions of the poems of Anacreon and Sappho. She was a staunch champion of Homer in the Ancients and Moderns debate, in which she defended his works against what she saw as the contemporary decline in standards of taste. Despite literary feuds with Antoine Houdar de la Motte and Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, and her differences in particular with Alexander Pope, with whom she fundamentally disagreed on how best to approach translating Homer, Dacier was held in high regard by her contemporaries. Even those with whom she fell out "demonstrably regarded her as the eminent authority she deserved to be" (Weinbrot, p. 1). Her professional accomplishments and fine translations were referred to whenever an argument was made in favour of scholarly female education, and she is one of the "distinguished women" featured in Mary Hay's Female Biography (1803). Provenance: from the library of Paul-Antoine-Léopold de Bauffremont-Courtenay (1825-1842), with his armorial bookplates. Three volumes, duodecimo (164 x 93 mm). Contemporary mottled calf, spines with gilt-tooled raised bands, compartments decorated with gilt shell tools, red morocco labels, volume numbers in gilt on second compartments, board edges tooled in gilt, covers ruled in blind and with matching gilt shell tools at corners, marbled endpapers, edges red, green silk bookmarkers. Engraved frontispiece in vol. 1 by Antoine Coypel, printer's device of the Imprimerie Royale on title pages, woodcut head- and tailpieces, initials. Head of spines and corners professionally restored, joints discreetly repaired in places, small damp stains to margins of engraved frontispiece, occasional faint foxing or small mark to contents, light browning to a couple of central gatherings in vol. III, else clean. A very good, well-margined set, presenting handsomely in a contemporary binding. The Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology, 1995; Anthony Grafton et al., The Classical Tradition, 2010; Julie Candler Hayes, "Of Meaning and Modernity: Anne Dacier and the Homer Debate", in David Lee Rubin, ed., Strategic Rewriting, 2002; Howard D. Weinbrot, "Alexander Pope and Madame Dacier's Homer", Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 1/2, 1999.