DAUGHTER OF THE HOUSE

A ""house where I was born"" occasions an ""I remember"" which ranges with unconfined sentiment through the years of her childhood, back further to its even earlier history (when Mark Twain and other literary figures were all part of this Hartford, Connecticut settlement) and down to the present when it has been doomed (by a throughway project) and is now dismantled by the ""daughter of the house"". All the familiar furnishings (the inevitable Tiffany lamp and Morris chair and etc.,) revive the past, and with it Mrs. Amos' own personal history. She tries to grapple with the ghosts of her parents- the charming father who became a college president; the Danish born mother who came to America at 18, acted on the stage until her marriage to Henry Perkins; and the temperamental differences which led to a lack of communion between them. Kinderscenen give way to the heart-break of their last years- her mother's death, her father's stroke which puts him out of contact and out of reach; finally the ""trinity"" has dissolved. It is, ostensibly, a search for ""the tiny point. In time and place....which is me"" -- a kind of search which is usually more meaningful to the writer than the reader, expressing rather womanly tropisms some of which might be better left unsaid. But an older market may appreciate its nostalgia.