Edmund Gosse (1849 1928), best known for his memoir Father and Son, was one of the foremost literary critics of his day, even though he had not received a university education. Invited to give the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge, he developed the materials for this book, first published in 1885. Gosse sets out his theory of classical poetry, analysing its rise in the seventeenth century in opposition to freer, more romantic blank-verse forms. The book became the subject of a famously excoriating forty-page review by Oxford-educated critic John Churton Collins. While Collins'...

Father and Son, a memoir first published anonymously in 1907, was Gosse's second book and is arecord of his struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself.' The book describes Edmund's early years in an exceptionally devout Plymouth Brethren home. His mother, who died early and painfully of breast cancer, was a writer of Christian tracts. His father was an influential, though largely self-taught, invertebrate zoologist and student of marine biology who, after his wife's death, took Edmund to live in Devon. The book focuses on the relationship between a sternly religious father who rejects...

Edmund Gosse wrote of his account of his life, "This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs." Father and Son remains one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it, Edmund Gosse recounts, with humor and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles to forge his own identity despite the loving control of his father. His work is a key document of the crisis of faith and doubt and a penetrating exploration of the impact of evolutionary science. An astute, well-observed, and moving portrait...