KEANE, John B. Big Maggie (Signed first edition)

Cork: The Mercier Press, 1969. First edition. pp. 94. Small 8vo. Original red publisher’s cloth, title in gilt to spine, in the original pictorial dust jacket. A very good copy in a worn but complete dust jacket; light rubbing and marking to the jacket, some browning and foxing to the page edges, internally clean.

Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: “With every good wish – John B. Keane.”

John B. Keane’s celebrated play Big Maggie is among the finest works of twentieth-century Irish theatre. First performed in 1969, the play centres on Maggie Polpin, a formidable matriarch who seizes control of her late husband’s farm, provoking a bitter struggle with her children over power, inheritance, and independence. Keane’s sharp ear for rural speech and his ability to blend dark humour with social observation made the play a staple of Irish theatre and amateur dramatic societies for decades.

Copies of the first Mercier Press edition are increasingly scarce, particularly in the fragile pictorial dust jacket and signed examples such as the present copy. Keane (1928–2002), long associated with Listowel, Co. Kerry, remains one of Ireland’s most popular playwrights, and Big Maggie stands alongside works such as Sive and The Field as a cornerstone of his dramatic legacy.

[L3 8D]