Product DescriptionPræterita 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.About the AuthorA. O. J. Cockshut is a literary scholar and the author of The Imagination of Charles Dickens and other works.