DEVELOPMENT, A Novel
An excerpt from the beginning of the Preface by Amy Lowell:
THIS is a singular book; in many ways, a remarkable book. To any one interested in the reasons why of personality (as I confess myself to be), it cannot fail to provoke attention. The autobiographic novel has an illustrious ancestry, the autobiography masquerading as novel is almost as numerous a clan. Is Development the granddaughter of Jane Eyre or of Obermann? If the former, Nancy is a finely conceived character - study; if the latter, we are face to face with a young lady the least to be said of whom is that she is unlike anybody else.
This is the record of the growth—not yet of a soul, that may come—but of a mind. Through a series of deft touches, we see a small, lonely, imaginative child gradually evolving into an artist. From the first page in which the little girl of four is sitting in a box which "was really a boat," to the last chapter of aphorisms—chippings of the artistic egg—slowly, very slowly, the character is built up for us. A strange, contradictory character, supersensitive to a certain set of impressions, quite cold to others; a character overweighted on one side, leaning heavily to a bias, and yet always with the desire to stand upright, to fill the empty places, to tread clearly and evenly, to see the world as a whole. Little by little the girl realizes her 1imitations, strains against them—pitifully inadequate struggle for so gifted a being in an environment where her subtle psychological needs are evidently but vaguely understood. And yet, is that true, after all? For the result has certainly been the creation in Nancy of all sorts of intuitions and understandings, of a delicate colour sense, of a rare perception of the possibilities in words. I think I have never met or read of any one with a keener or more conscious realization of the various beauty of words. They are to her what pigment is to the painter, what tone is to the musician. To most people, even to most authors, words are chiefly symbols; to Nancy, they have an essence of their own, a vibration in themselves quite apart from their connotations.
Nancy is evidently a writer born. "When I am older I will write a book" is the burden of her childhood's years. At nine years old she starts her first literary venture. Her mind 1S filled with the clash and clamour of Pope's Iliad, augmented by a boy's story-book of the second Punic War. She falls in love with Carthage, and so she begins her story: "Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign." Nothing precocious happily, for precociousness in nine cases out of ten ends in abortion. Her hopes are beyond her power of expression. The later Nancy records this episode with charming humour, particularly the end where the little girl, lying awake, suddenly remembers that she has forgotten to mention Carthage itself, and creeps out of bed to add to her one accomplished paragraph: "Carthage was a great city.
Nancy speaks of her childhood as "epic," and so indeed her imaginings undoubtedly made it. The family were in the habit of spending their winters abroad, and Nancy is taken to Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Spain. She develops a thirst for history, undoubtedly fostered by the long hours spent in museums.
At first she rebels at these, and her mind wanders away to a puppy she has seen on the steps or to the donkey she has ridden the day before. But at last her curiosity betrays her, history books make armour and pottery comprehensible; she learns of the past not only through books, but through a series of object lessons. "Fairy Tales delighted her but little," she records; fact is the thing which charms. It is always the actual which stirs her, even if the actual be written in the past tense. Always, from beginning to end, her creative power moves about the real. Here are a few examples of her gift for words playing upon a thing actually seen:
"A clock had long ago struck ten in the clear Scillonian air. The black stems of scattered masts were lit by gold buds."
"The air was filled with a sudden richness, the scent of slumbering grass."
"Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue darkness with a gold knife."
She speaks of waves as "dented blue or curved racing green"; says of the Scillies that "untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness; as though, a bubble on the lips of the sea, each had been blown to reality that morning." The two poems in the book are fine, imaginative studies in the creation of atmosphere, in that power of understanding the essence of places which is the author's especial excellence.
But the epic childhood is suddenly broken. Nancy is sent to school. She resented this bitterly; in fact, the author is at no pains to hide the fact that she still resents it. And yet it is evident that...
"1028003584"
THIS is a singular book; in many ways, a remarkable book. To any one interested in the reasons why of personality (as I confess myself to be), it cannot fail to provoke attention. The autobiographic novel has an illustrious ancestry, the autobiography masquerading as novel is almost as numerous a clan. Is Development the granddaughter of Jane Eyre or of Obermann? If the former, Nancy is a finely conceived character - study; if the latter, we are face to face with a young lady the least to be said of whom is that she is unlike anybody else.
This is the record of the growth—not yet of a soul, that may come—but of a mind. Through a series of deft touches, we see a small, lonely, imaginative child gradually evolving into an artist. From the first page in which the little girl of four is sitting in a box which "was really a boat," to the last chapter of aphorisms—chippings of the artistic egg—slowly, very slowly, the character is built up for us. A strange, contradictory character, supersensitive to a certain set of impressions, quite cold to others; a character overweighted on one side, leaning heavily to a bias, and yet always with the desire to stand upright, to fill the empty places, to tread clearly and evenly, to see the world as a whole. Little by little the girl realizes her 1imitations, strains against them—pitifully inadequate struggle for so gifted a being in an environment where her subtle psychological needs are evidently but vaguely understood. And yet, is that true, after all? For the result has certainly been the creation in Nancy of all sorts of intuitions and understandings, of a delicate colour sense, of a rare perception of the possibilities in words. I think I have never met or read of any one with a keener or more conscious realization of the various beauty of words. They are to her what pigment is to the painter, what tone is to the musician. To most people, even to most authors, words are chiefly symbols; to Nancy, they have an essence of their own, a vibration in themselves quite apart from their connotations.
Nancy is evidently a writer born. "When I am older I will write a book" is the burden of her childhood's years. At nine years old she starts her first literary venture. Her mind 1S filled with the clash and clamour of Pope's Iliad, augmented by a boy's story-book of the second Punic War. She falls in love with Carthage, and so she begins her story: "Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign." Nothing precocious happily, for precociousness in nine cases out of ten ends in abortion. Her hopes are beyond her power of expression. The later Nancy records this episode with charming humour, particularly the end where the little girl, lying awake, suddenly remembers that she has forgotten to mention Carthage itself, and creeps out of bed to add to her one accomplished paragraph: "Carthage was a great city.
Nancy speaks of her childhood as "epic," and so indeed her imaginings undoubtedly made it. The family were in the habit of spending their winters abroad, and Nancy is taken to Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Spain. She develops a thirst for history, undoubtedly fostered by the long hours spent in museums.
At first she rebels at these, and her mind wanders away to a puppy she has seen on the steps or to the donkey she has ridden the day before. But at last her curiosity betrays her, history books make armour and pottery comprehensible; she learns of the past not only through books, but through a series of object lessons. "Fairy Tales delighted her but little," she records; fact is the thing which charms. It is always the actual which stirs her, even if the actual be written in the past tense. Always, from beginning to end, her creative power moves about the real. Here are a few examples of her gift for words playing upon a thing actually seen:
"A clock had long ago struck ten in the clear Scillonian air. The black stems of scattered masts were lit by gold buds."
"The air was filled with a sudden richness, the scent of slumbering grass."
"Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue darkness with a gold knife."
She speaks of waves as "dented blue or curved racing green"; says of the Scillies that "untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness; as though, a bubble on the lips of the sea, each had been blown to reality that morning." The two poems in the book are fine, imaginative studies in the creation of atmosphere, in that power of understanding the essence of places which is the author's especial excellence.
But the epic childhood is suddenly broken. Nancy is sent to school. She resented this bitterly; in fact, the author is at no pains to hide the fact that she still resents it. And yet it is evident that...
DEVELOPMENT, A Novel
An excerpt from the beginning of the Preface by Amy Lowell:
THIS is a singular book; in many ways, a remarkable book. To any one interested in the reasons why of personality (as I confess myself to be), it cannot fail to provoke attention. The autobiographic novel has an illustrious ancestry, the autobiography masquerading as novel is almost as numerous a clan. Is Development the granddaughter of Jane Eyre or of Obermann? If the former, Nancy is a finely conceived character - study; if the latter, we are face to face with a young lady the least to be said of whom is that she is unlike anybody else.
This is the record of the growth—not yet of a soul, that may come—but of a mind. Through a series of deft touches, we see a small, lonely, imaginative child gradually evolving into an artist. From the first page in which the little girl of four is sitting in a box which "was really a boat," to the last chapter of aphorisms—chippings of the artistic egg—slowly, very slowly, the character is built up for us. A strange, contradictory character, supersensitive to a certain set of impressions, quite cold to others; a character overweighted on one side, leaning heavily to a bias, and yet always with the desire to stand upright, to fill the empty places, to tread clearly and evenly, to see the world as a whole. Little by little the girl realizes her 1imitations, strains against them—pitifully inadequate struggle for so gifted a being in an environment where her subtle psychological needs are evidently but vaguely understood. And yet, is that true, after all? For the result has certainly been the creation in Nancy of all sorts of intuitions and understandings, of a delicate colour sense, of a rare perception of the possibilities in words. I think I have never met or read of any one with a keener or more conscious realization of the various beauty of words. They are to her what pigment is to the painter, what tone is to the musician. To most people, even to most authors, words are chiefly symbols; to Nancy, they have an essence of their own, a vibration in themselves quite apart from their connotations.
Nancy is evidently a writer born. "When I am older I will write a book" is the burden of her childhood's years. At nine years old she starts her first literary venture. Her mind 1S filled with the clash and clamour of Pope's Iliad, augmented by a boy's story-book of the second Punic War. She falls in love with Carthage, and so she begins her story: "Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign." Nothing precocious happily, for precociousness in nine cases out of ten ends in abortion. Her hopes are beyond her power of expression. The later Nancy records this episode with charming humour, particularly the end where the little girl, lying awake, suddenly remembers that she has forgotten to mention Carthage itself, and creeps out of bed to add to her one accomplished paragraph: "Carthage was a great city.
Nancy speaks of her childhood as "epic," and so indeed her imaginings undoubtedly made it. The family were in the habit of spending their winters abroad, and Nancy is taken to Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Spain. She develops a thirst for history, undoubtedly fostered by the long hours spent in museums.
At first she rebels at these, and her mind wanders away to a puppy she has seen on the steps or to the donkey she has ridden the day before. But at last her curiosity betrays her, history books make armour and pottery comprehensible; she learns of the past not only through books, but through a series of object lessons. "Fairy Tales delighted her but little," she records; fact is the thing which charms. It is always the actual which stirs her, even if the actual be written in the past tense. Always, from beginning to end, her creative power moves about the real. Here are a few examples of her gift for words playing upon a thing actually seen:
"A clock had long ago struck ten in the clear Scillonian air. The black stems of scattered masts were lit by gold buds."
"The air was filled with a sudden richness, the scent of slumbering grass."
"Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue darkness with a gold knife."
She speaks of waves as "dented blue or curved racing green"; says of the Scillies that "untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness; as though, a bubble on the lips of the sea, each had been blown to reality that morning." The two poems in the book are fine, imaginative studies in the creation of atmosphere, in that power of understanding the essence of places which is the author's especial excellence.
But the epic childhood is suddenly broken. Nancy is sent to school. She resented this bitterly; in fact, the author is at no pains to hide the fact that she still resents it. And yet it is evident that...
THIS is a singular book; in many ways, a remarkable book. To any one interested in the reasons why of personality (as I confess myself to be), it cannot fail to provoke attention. The autobiographic novel has an illustrious ancestry, the autobiography masquerading as novel is almost as numerous a clan. Is Development the granddaughter of Jane Eyre or of Obermann? If the former, Nancy is a finely conceived character - study; if the latter, we are face to face with a young lady the least to be said of whom is that she is unlike anybody else.
This is the record of the growth—not yet of a soul, that may come—but of a mind. Through a series of deft touches, we see a small, lonely, imaginative child gradually evolving into an artist. From the first page in which the little girl of four is sitting in a box which "was really a boat," to the last chapter of aphorisms—chippings of the artistic egg—slowly, very slowly, the character is built up for us. A strange, contradictory character, supersensitive to a certain set of impressions, quite cold to others; a character overweighted on one side, leaning heavily to a bias, and yet always with the desire to stand upright, to fill the empty places, to tread clearly and evenly, to see the world as a whole. Little by little the girl realizes her 1imitations, strains against them—pitifully inadequate struggle for so gifted a being in an environment where her subtle psychological needs are evidently but vaguely understood. And yet, is that true, after all? For the result has certainly been the creation in Nancy of all sorts of intuitions and understandings, of a delicate colour sense, of a rare perception of the possibilities in words. I think I have never met or read of any one with a keener or more conscious realization of the various beauty of words. They are to her what pigment is to the painter, what tone is to the musician. To most people, even to most authors, words are chiefly symbols; to Nancy, they have an essence of their own, a vibration in themselves quite apart from their connotations.
Nancy is evidently a writer born. "When I am older I will write a book" is the burden of her childhood's years. At nine years old she starts her first literary venture. Her mind 1S filled with the clash and clamour of Pope's Iliad, augmented by a boy's story-book of the second Punic War. She falls in love with Carthage, and so she begins her story: "Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign." Nothing precocious happily, for precociousness in nine cases out of ten ends in abortion. Her hopes are beyond her power of expression. The later Nancy records this episode with charming humour, particularly the end where the little girl, lying awake, suddenly remembers that she has forgotten to mention Carthage itself, and creeps out of bed to add to her one accomplished paragraph: "Carthage was a great city.
Nancy speaks of her childhood as "epic," and so indeed her imaginings undoubtedly made it. The family were in the habit of spending their winters abroad, and Nancy is taken to Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Spain. She develops a thirst for history, undoubtedly fostered by the long hours spent in museums.
At first she rebels at these, and her mind wanders away to a puppy she has seen on the steps or to the donkey she has ridden the day before. But at last her curiosity betrays her, history books make armour and pottery comprehensible; she learns of the past not only through books, but through a series of object lessons. "Fairy Tales delighted her but little," she records; fact is the thing which charms. It is always the actual which stirs her, even if the actual be written in the past tense. Always, from beginning to end, her creative power moves about the real. Here are a few examples of her gift for words playing upon a thing actually seen:
"A clock had long ago struck ten in the clear Scillonian air. The black stems of scattered masts were lit by gold buds."
"The air was filled with a sudden richness, the scent of slumbering grass."
"Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue darkness with a gold knife."
She speaks of waves as "dented blue or curved racing green"; says of the Scillies that "untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness; as though, a bubble on the lips of the sea, each had been blown to reality that morning." The two poems in the book are fine, imaginative studies in the creation of atmosphere, in that power of understanding the essence of places which is the author's especial excellence.
But the epic childhood is suddenly broken. Nancy is sent to school. She resented this bitterly; in fact, the author is at no pains to hide the fact that she still resents it. And yet it is evident that...
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Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940015800029 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | OGB |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 443 KB |
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