Mrs. Farrell; a novel, with an introd. by Mildred Howells (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

INTRODUCTIONThis story of my father's was first printed imder the title of Private Theatricals in the Atlantic Monthly of 1875, while he was still editor of the magazine. It appeared a few years after Henry James's Gahrielle de Bergerac, and neither of the two short novels was ever republished by their authors. My father's must have been written in the Concord Avenue house in Cambridge which he and my mother had just built and moved into. They were very proud of the new house, even of its mansard roof such as every house of the period was obliged to have, and which is reflected in the newly added French roofs of some of the houses near the church in West Pekin; but their greatest pride was in the library. My impressions of the house are those of rather extreme youth, but I can remember that it was lined with bookshelves bordered by bands of red, scalloped leather that were meant, as I now suppose, to keep the dust from the book tops but which were then pleasantly mysterious to the infant mind. There were very satisfactory tiles of Eastlake tendencies over the fireplace, picturing the seasons in yellow and brown, and a vast flat-topped desk in the middle of the room with rows of drawers on either sideINTRODUCTIONthat went down to the floor, leaving a dark hole between them, which was useful as a doll's house when not occupied by my father's feet. The room was at the back of the house, for greater quiet, and looked out into a deep, grassy yard divided down the center by a hedge of lilacs, and only invaded by birds and children.The background of Mrs. Farrell is the New England farm boarding house, which was the only form of simple country sojourn before summer cottages were imagined, and it is interesting to compare it with the farm boarding in The Vacation of the KelwynSj written so many years after and giving a much fuller study of the cotmtry people. The farmhouse of this story, kept by the finer type of New England farmers, must, I think, have been the sort of simimer place that my parents were always seeking, and the Kelwyns' experience a picture of what they more often found. In the latter book the country people are of much poorer stuff than the Woodwards, but one feels in his handling of them the greater tenderness and imderstanding that age teaches, and youth, no matter how sympathetic, cannot compass.During the later summers, while we still lived in Cambridge, we tried many different kinds of farm board, and I wish I could remember more of them for comparison with those of Mrs. Farrell and the Kelwyns, but I can only recall one of all our landladies, a good-natured farmer's wife, so stout that her apron strings only appeared where they were tied behind her. I made many solemn journeysINTRODUCTIONaround her in search of them, and I think it must have always been while she was frying doughnuts, for that act is firmly associated in my mind with her invisible apron strings. I was also vaguely conscious of a feud that raged between our hosts and their relations, over a family Bible that had reversed the squaring of the circle by having its comers worn off until it was quite round. It had been borrowed and wrongfully detained by a younger branch of the family, leaving hatred and imcharitableness behind. These reflections, I am afraid, do not throw any great light on the practical conditions of farm boarding, but they are all I have.It is amusing to one who started life in the eighteen-seventies, to see it again from their angle in these pages written not only about them, but in them. One notes with surprise, after the feminine activity of the present, the general resignation of even faintly middle-aged ladies to headaches and invalidism, and the walks taken through woods and meadows in trailing draperies. The painting of cat-tails emerges from a very dead past, and even the more modem charcoal head of Blossom brings back the day of William Himt*s classes, when charcoal heads prevailed, and every Boston you