Speaking Volumes

In this book, Edith Newman Devlin remembers her childhood in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s as a poor protestant living among even poorer catholics. She tells of her strange home in the gate lodge of Jonathan Swift's hospital for the insane, and of her increasingly strained relationship with her devoted but undemonstrative father. Reading was to be her salvation, and in novels like Jane Eyre, Hard Times and Anna Karenina she found her own inarticulate experience better understood and better expressed.