MISS ABBY FITCH-MARTIN

A dire documentary of family affairs reads like a Dickens novel of drawn-out misery and presents the outwardly prim, virtuous, quiet Christian lady, Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, as her niece knew her from childhood on. Frustrated and embittered by her father's second marriage, she would sanction no recognition of its issue and found a chance for retaliation when motherless Kataryn and younger sister, Esther, came to her house in Whitesboro, N. Y. There was no bottom to the pettiness of her caustic bitterness, whether it was financial, for the girls were allowed pittances and never got any of their inheritance or food, for she used hunger as a handy and powerful weapon to enforce submission to her dictates or humiliation, in sickness or health, in public and in private -- or schools for Miss Abby respected no educational requirement, rule or regulation. It is a long, sad list of ignominious incidents in which the girls never came out victors but managed some happy and helpful relationships outside of their aunt's domination from which they were freed by Aunt Abby's death in 1937. Bruised but never beaten, Kataryn's account is aware but amazingly calm about these iniquitous injuries to innocence and misses not one pinpoint of her aunt's perniciousness. A true-story, first person confessional which is absorbingly poisonously horrible.