A VICTORIAN SON: An Autobiography 1897-1922

by Stuart Cloete ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 1973

Stuart Cloete was always an energetic novelist and the quality carries over here in the first part of his autobiography which he tells in easy, tumbled fashion remembering apparently everything back to the wet nurse and Scott's Emulsion of his childhood in Paris during the belle epoque (he was born in the year of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the ""zenith of British glory""). You won't be long in finding out that it was a far, far better world and you won't be surprised to learn that he's both a man's man and a ladies' man, more of the latter -- the by-product of an adulatory mother and a father he ultimately disliked (although it was only years later that he learned of the scandal which forced his father to change the family name). Away from the bosom of the nourrice (misspelled -- there are other errors) and out of the bed of the serving girl, he's sent to boarding school -- the first he loathed -- and then served in World War I at an early age where he was wounded twice (the second time overhearing ""this boy will die"") but he lived to marry his nurse Eileen. The book ends at this point and it is, as Cloete admits to being, ""visual and tactile,"" extroverted and sometimes gluttonously verbal. But it's when he's censuring modern times that he is most likely to remove himself from them.

Pub Date: April 23, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: John Day

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION