Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

In 1867, a boy arrives at Wellington College where his father has just been appointed headmaster. That boy is E.F. Benson, and what follows is a gorgeously detailed portrait of Victorian childhood at its most privileged and peculiar. Benson recalls his parents with startling clarity: his father's stern presence that masked deep affection, and his mother, whose "enchanting" personality cast a spell over the entire household. These pages brim with the specific joys of childhood in a grand English country house: games with siblings, discoveries in the garden, the rhythms of meals and prayers and the slow summer afternoons that seemed to last forever. But this is not mere nostalgia. Benson writes with a novelist's eye for the telling detail and the moment that reveals character. He captures a world that was already fading by the time he put pen to paper in 1920, the final years of a way of life that the Great War would obliterate. For anyone who has ever tried to recapture the lost country of childhood, this memoir is a map drawn by a master.