Those First Affections

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Very Good+. 1938. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy, slight bumping to upper corners, spine cloth slightly faded, vintage bookseller rubber-stamp on front pastedown (Bertrand Smith Acres of Books, Long Beach, Calif.)]. Mid-career novel by this longtime editor at The Nation, the wife of poet/critic Mark Van Doren and the mother of notorious game-show cheater Charles Van Doren. It's a depiction of the subjective worldview of a young girl from ages 6 to 14, which a contemporary reviewer thought "deceptively simple [but with] a good deal more strength than the reader realizes at first." Being as how the author was born in 1896 and the novel's narrative spans the years from 1897 to 1910, it seems a pretty safe bet that she was retroactively channeling her own childhood, more or less. This was the fourth of Mrs. Van Doren's five published novels (her NYT obituary gets the total wrong); she also wrote several non-fiction books, based on her family life, later on. .