Daphne Bruno

"Daphne Bruno" by Ernest Raymond is a novel written in the early 20th century. It appears to be a family and coming‑of‑age story set from late‑Victorian England into early urban modernity, following the brilliant but self‑regarding critic T. Tenter Bruno, his spirited daughter Daphne, her timid brother Owen, the warm servant Hollins, and the severe guardian Miss Durgon. The book explores how high-minded principles, class habits, and religious fashions collide with everyday love, grief, and child‑rearing.

The opening of the novel follows T. Tenter Bruno awaiting news of his first child, revelling in his public persona while privately vowing to anchor life in pity rather than pose. A telegram announces a daughter, and on his night drive to the nursing home he imagines “Daphne” from infancy to bride, even as his wife Sheila endures pain, ambivalence, and then sudden exultation at the baby’s face. Back home, domestic life takes shape around Hollins’s bustling kindness, Eadigo the gardener’s blunt common sense, and Bruno’s demand for quiet so his work won’t be “shipwrecked” by a crying infant. A second pregnancy brings Sheila dread and a fixed foreboding; she insists on staying at home and dies after Owen’s birth, leaving Bruno grief‑struck yet eager to withdraw into his study. Pressed by his conventional sister Belle, he hires Miss Durgon, a rigid “lady” housekeeper‑guardian, sparking a low, constant skirmish with loyal Hollins. The scene then shifts to Daphne’s earliest memories—morning romps with her father, fairy tales (Grimm’s clarity versus Andersen’s troubling beauty), and the family’s move from rural Sussex to a red‑brick West Kensington house with its thrilling cellars, city noises, and church excursions. With her father off to India, Hollins’s lively High Church Sundays (pictures, incense, processions, muffins, and fire‑roasted chestnuts) contrast with Miss Durgon’s prosaic discipline. As Daphne grows tall and tomboyish, testing rules and savoring Hollins’s warmth, her budding defiance of Miss Durgon closes this opening stretch. (This is an automatically generated summary.)