RelationsJonathan Cape, 2003 - 279 pages "In this remarkable book, Jane Miller writes about the experiences of being a daughter and a sister, of the intensities of family life and of the illuminations that come from the last days and death of parents. Relations offers a portrait of a record-keeping, middle-class kinship, reaching back into the past, which begins from her parents' long marriage, its mysteries and incompatibilities, their shared sense of themselves as artists - she as a painter, he as a pianist. It was a marriage marked by the dismay it met with from both their families. Writing about these things leads Miller to further explorations: her relations with her maternal grandfather, Redcliffe Salaman, scientist, historian, secular Jew, and his with his devoutly Jewish wife. Her father's family were Unitarian - Dissenters since the 17th century - and her great-grandfather, Collet Dobson Collet, was known for his role in the successful campaign to liberate the press from the 'taxes on knowledge' imposed by government and for his friendship with Karl Marx. Collet's daughter Clara was one of the first women civil servants, and an economist who was involved in the first stirrings of the Welfare State. Here are the t |
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Page 4
... never quite fitted in . She knows this , though she puts it differently : that she always wanted to be in the middle of things and never was . She tells me that she was never clever enough for her mother , never as ' rapturously ...
... never quite fitted in . She knows this , though she puts it differently : that she always wanted to be in the middle of things and never was . She tells me that she was never clever enough for her mother , never as ' rapturously ...
Page 28
... never , ever to disturb my mother again during dinner I froze with shame . Later , when I was fourteen , he summoned ... never anything but civil to one another , though my father snarled a few of his true feelings for his father - in ...
... never , ever to disturb my mother again during dinner I froze with shame . Later , when I was fourteen , he summoned ... never anything but civil to one another , though my father snarled a few of his true feelings for his father - in ...
Page 236
... never went to films or plays or watched television , except at the end of his life , the news on Channel 4. He had learned several languages entirely through reading in them , believing that you got a better class of language that way ...
... never went to films or plays or watched television , except at the end of his life , the news on Channel 4. He had learned several languages entirely through reading in them , believing that you got a better class of language that way ...
Contents
Portrait of an Artist | 1 |
The Potato Man | 26 |
Three Sisters | 59 |
Copyright | |
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