Beschreibung:

Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace. Translated into French by a Russian lady and from the French by Ciara Bell. New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1886
6 volumes, 12mo. Publisher's brown cloth stamped and lettered in black and gilt; lightly rubbed to head and foot of spines and corners.
A fine copy of the first English edition of this historical epic.
Tolstoy wrote War and Peace over seven years. Famously difficult to categorize, the author stated that it is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." It follows Russian aristocratic families as Napoleon invades Russia in the early nineteenth century. The English edition was published twenty years after the first Russian edition, which was released from 1865-69. It was translated from the French by Clara Bell (“made exclusively for the publisher” according to the versos of the title-pages). Bell’s “Translator’s Postscript” appears at the beginning of the fifth volume.
REFERENCE:Harris, p. 152.