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The Children

出版	C. Scribner's Sons, 1985-05
主題	Fiction / GeneralFiction / ClassicsFiction / LiteraryFiction / Family Life / General
ISBN	06841845329780684184531
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=AoLWAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"One of Mrs. Wharton's later novels, this is a story of expatriate Americans in the 1920s. Its theme is the predicament of children whose rich, pleasure-mad parents progress through marriages and divorces as casually as they flit around the fashionable European resorts of the period. Martin Boyne, travelling expectantly to Italy for a meeting with his old love Rose Sellars, recently widowed, meets on shipboard a lively group of children who are to join their parents in Venice. They are an assorted lot, since the parents had divorced, made other marriages, and finally come together again. Judith, the eldest, old and wise for her sixteen years, watches over them, trying to maintain a 'family' pattern. Martin is intrigued and goes with them to Venice where he finds the parents leading an extravagant life at the Lido and obviously on the brink of another break-up. He leaves for his idyllic reunion with Rose, which is soon shattered by the arrival of Judith and her charges to beg for his support in trying to stabilize the situation with their parents. Martin's growing love for Judith--of which she is unaware--causes Rose to withdraw tactfully, and he is saved from giving himself away by the arrival of the children's mother with promises of a settled home life. The author, herself an expatriate of an older generation, portrays here her deep concern with the changes which followed the 1914-1918 War, 'a new civilization which Edith Wharton saw in triumphant progress, a civilization based on the avoidance of pain ... a denial of guilt and responsibility, a pursuit of personal content at all costs.' (Millicent Bell: Edith Wharton and Henry James)"--Jacket