C. P. Snow's

(1949) is a long, absorbing

in which Lewis Eliot, the first-person narrator, recounts his life from 1914, when he is almost nine years old, to 1933, when he is twenty-eight. It was originally the third of Snow's

series of novels to be published, but in the sequence as rearranged by Snow for the 1972 omnibus edition, it stands first. The novel opens on a June evening in 1914 when “a sense of overwhelming dread” (6) seizes Eliot as he returns to his home in the suburbs of a provincial town after a day spent playing with other boys. Eliot's apprehensive homecomings will be a recurrent motif of the “Strangers and Brothers” series. In this case, his apprehension proves justified: his amiable, good-natured, ineffectual…

1533 words

Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Time of Hope". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 March 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=19407, accessed 27 November 2024.]