The Trouble of One House

E-223: Doubleday. Very Good in Very Good- dust jacket. 1950. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. , Garden City, NY, 1950. 314 pgs. Signed and inscribed by Brendan Gill on the FFEP. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in 1/4 cloth and paper covered boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Some moments of fascination, implied rather than overt, the imprint of Catholicism and a heavy overcast of death for the story of several relationships which are uneasy, unresolved and never fully stated. Here is the expectation and final certainty of death as it affects all those who had known Elizabeth Rowan: -Thomas, her husband, cold and unapproachable who had withdrawn from the surfeit of love she had offered him- and her children; Catherine Gately, her nurse, who had been Thomas Rowan's mistress momentarily; Ben Maher, her doctor, who had always loved her but had not been able to save her; Margaret, her sister, who had countered Elizabeth's gaiety with a forbidding disapproval. And at the close Thomas Rowan is left alone to assume the obligations toward his children in the knowledge that he will fail them- as he had failed Elizabeth. There's an evasive if often compelling quality here, some writing which is sensitive and suggestive. EB; 9.1 X 6.6 X 1.1 inches; 314 pages; Signed by Author .