![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Henry takes after his father, sickened to his stomach by the inevitable stress off incurring disappointment he cannot help causing. Helen is a sweet but quick to collapse - her mother literally takes her breath away, and brings it back with nightly applications of ointment. His mother’s equal in passion, Stephen reviles her for her cruelty (especially when she threatens to clean - and thereby destroy - his beloved, Teddy). They never told you … they were not your kind of human beings - merely other human beings… How solitary it made you feel! These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and the speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity. Incapable of understanding her children as individuals, with expectations and needs so different from her own, she is oblivious to the misery she wreaks.Ī profound depression came upon her. Ill-suited to the housework and childcare that occupy her every moment, Eva’s arms bloom with eczema. It took me a day of lazy-paced reading to take in the story of the Knapps - of fiery Evangeline Knapp, her dreamy and impractical husband Lester, and their three children - meek Helen and Henry, and wild Stephen, the littlest. ![]()
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