Praeterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts, Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life

Præterita is perhaps the best-loved of all the fruits of Ruskin's many-sided and tormented genius. This exceptional biography--the first of Ruskin's works in the Whitehouse edition--simultaneously presents a deeply reflective portrait of an early 19th-century Protestant family--its genuine piety, its severities, its suffocating possessive affections--and the product (at once intellectually brilliant and emotionally damaged) of its educational system.