Praeterita is perhaps the best-loved of all the fruits of Ruskin's many-sided and tormented genius. This exceptional biography--the first of Ruskin's works in the Whitehouse edition--simultaneously presents a deeply reflective portrait of an early 19th-century Protestant family--its genuine piety, its severities, its suffocating possessive affections--and the product (at once intellectually brilliant and emotionally damaged) of its educational system.
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