Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood

In this highly original and evocative memoir, Edith Newman Devlin remembers her childhood in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s as a poor Protestant living among even poorer Catholics. She tells of her strange home in the gate-lodge of Jonathan Swift's hospital for the insane, and of her increasingly strained and painful relationship with her devoted but undemonstrative widowed father. Reading was to be her salvation, and in novels like Jane Eyre, Hard Times, and Anna Karenina, among others, she found her own inarticulate experience better understood and better expressed. Pithy, illuminating commentaries on the emotional truth of great literature alternate with chapters of strong personal memoir to make this unique book as universal in its reach as it is individual in its telling.