Father and Son
by Edmund Gosse
It’s alive with specificity but it’s full of the universal – fathers and sons, children growing up and outstripping their parents
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“There are autobiographies that are fantastically egotistical, but they tend to be not very good books. The universal is in the small. You write about your own life, but if you write about it with enough love and care then it will have the universal running through it. This book is a good illustration. It’s alive with specificity but it’s full of the universal – fathers and sons, children growing up and outstripping their parents.” Read more...
The best books on First-Person Narratives
William Fiennes, Novelist
“I have read innumerable books over my lifetime and some I would have said in the past were wonderful. But the only book that, in my eyes, has remained wonderful is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. When it was first published in 1907 it was shocking because up till then no son would ever criticise his father…He was brought up among the Plymouth Brethren. His father wanted him to become a special child, which means an especially religious child. And Edmund very dutifully did all the things he was required to do but belief never took hold. And he describes how he was experiencing this as a child. There is a passage in the book where he discovers that his parents don’t know everything, that his father doesn’t know everything.” Read more...
Dorothy Rowe, Psychologist
