Praeterita And Dilecta

Praeterita And Dilecta

Summary

To call Praeterita an autobiography is to tell only part of the truth. A book like no other, by oneof the greatest masters of English prose., it is less a narrative than the prismatic sotry of an extraordinary mind and a passionate heart told in terms of the author's aesthetic education. Ruskin was not merely the most important anglophone art critic and social commentator of the late nineteenth century: for his admirers - who included Proust - he was a Tolstoyan figure with the magic of an artist and the moral authority of a sage. Yet above all he was loved as a personality by friends and readers alilke, and it is the individual human qualitites which shine through the mercurial pages of Praeterita

Reviews

  • No autobiographer surpasses Ruskin in freshness and fulness of memory, nor in the power of giving interest to the apparently commonplace. The story fascinates
    Sir Leslie Stephen

About the author

John Ruskin

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