Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

In 1907, Edmund Gosse looked back on the battle that shaped him: the war between his father's rigid faith and his own hungry mind. Raised in a Victorian household where Darwin was unspoken and fairy tales were forbidden, young Edmund was trapped in a world of scripture, scientific pretension, and a father's crushing love. Philip Gosse, a passionate zoologist, had invented his own cosmology, a creation so perfect it seemed to prove the Almighty, even as the world outside roared with evolutionary doubt. The son broke away. The father never recovered. What remains is a memoir of extraordinary psychological precision, where humor sharpens the heartbreak and every sentence hums with the tension between belief and doubt, duty and selfhood. It is the most honest account ever written about the violence of leaving a family, and the loneliness of choosing your own mind.