Confessions of a Book-Lover

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About this book

An aunt's confusion between Tom Jones and Tom Brown of Rugby becomes one of Maurice Francis Egan's examples of the accidents that shape a reader. His recollections begin with boyhood discoveries, family judgments about suitable books and the pleasures of having time to imagine a story fully. He remembers painstakingly putting together the pages of a worn copy of The Scottish Chiefs, finding its imagined scenes worth the trouble.

These essays broaden from early reading to poetry, novelists, letters, biographies and memoirs. In the supplied discussion of poets, Egan compares Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne, considering how writers bring the assumptions of their own age to earlier periods. Religious belief also informs his judgments. The book will interest readers who enjoy personal literary criticism, where opinions about style and imagination grow out of particular encounters with books rather than an impersonal survey.