Indeed, the book takes much of its power from what Edmund rejected. One of the strengths of Father and Son is that the father's humanity confronts us as much as his religious obsessions. But he was not (and Edmund knew he was not) the "monster" that some readers saw in Edmund's portrayal of his father. That Philip Henry Gosse was one is undeniable. My parents were not fanatics of any sort. Most adolescents long to get away from the constraints and expectations of the parental home, and that over-anxious love so many of us experience. I looked at my own diaries recently, trying to find some enthusiastic reactions to that first reading, but it is simply one book among many in a list. But I think this might have been a case of being wise after the event, of rewriting the story, as Edmund himself did all the time. In the introduction to my biography of Edmund Gosse, I described it as "one of the formative books of my youth". I first read Father and Son in the little green Heinemann edition I found on my parents' shelves when I was 16 or so. It is the only book by either of the Gosses that is in print today, though in the years between 18 they published between them more than 90 books, as well as masses of contributions to periodicals, on natural history in the father's case, on literature in the son's.
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