Books

First edition, first impression, inscribed to his childhood nanny on the half-title, "For Annie, with best wishes - Christopher Isherwood". Annie Avis worked in the home of Isherwood's mother Kathleen for 44 years and was present when Isherwood started writing Goodbye to Berlin: "Kathleen and Nurse Avis were both happy at this literary activity going on under their roof" (Fryer, p. 132). Avis (d. 1948), born near Bury St Edmunds, remained unmarried after the death of her fiancé and begun her lifetime of tending to the Isherwood family home from the age of 30. "As a child Isherwood saw far more of Nanny, as he called her, than of his mother who was frequently called away from home to spend time with Frank or her mother" (Finney, p. 23). Though they were inseparable and mutually devoted, Christopher "knew precisely how to handle Nanny and exploit her affection for him" (Parker, p. 19), confiding to her the secrets of his childhood and early adulthood to gain her favour. Writing in the third person, he recalls in his autobiographical work Kathleen and Frank (1972) that "he treated [Avis] as a familiar with whom he could be shameless and at ease, as a servant with whom he could league himself against his own class" (p. 282). Among Isherwood's most famous works, Goodbye to Berlin comprises six semi-autobiographical stories set in Berlin in the immediate years before Hitler's rise to power. The "Sally Bowles" story formed the basis for Kander and Ebb's 1966 musical Cabaret, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical and was adapted into a film version in 1972, directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli. Connolly The Modern Movement 86; Woolmer 451. Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography, 1979; Jonathan Fryer, Isherwood, 1978; Christopher Isherwood, Kathleen and Frank, 1972; Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life Revealed, 2004. Octavo. Original grey cloth, spine lettered in red, top edge red. With dust jacket. Housed in a custom white cloth folding box. Toning to spine, cosmetic split to inner hinges, light browning to outer leaves; jacket unclipped and notably bright, nicks and minor rubbing, two closed tears to front panel: a near-fine copy in like jacket.

Sally Bowles is a novella by Christopher Isherwood, originally published in 1937 as part of the novel 'Goodbye to Berlin,' which is part of The Berlin Stories collection. The character of Sally Bowles, a young English singer in Berlin's Weimar Republic, became iconic, especially after the novella's adaptation into the musical 'Cabaret.'