[Gutenberg 42534] • The Narrow House

D.H Lawrence was so impressed with this he wrote to its author and praised it repeatedly to friends, as did Sinclair Lewis.

The author's first novel, first volume of a trilogy concerning the Farley family. "This penetrating study of the inter-relations of the various members of a family, any family, is as remorseless as fate and leads to dark and hidden places"

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It begins:

"The hot, bright street looked almost deserted. A sign swung before the disheveled building at the corner and on a purple ground one could read the notice, "Robinson & Son, Builders," painted in tall white letters. Some broken plaster had been thrown from one of the windows and lay on the dusty sidewalk in a glaring heap.

The old-fashioned house next door was as badly in need of improvements as the one undergoing alterations. The dingy brick walls were streaked by the drippage from the leaky tin gutter that ran along the roof. The massive shutters, thrown back from the long windows, were rotting away. Below the lifted panes very clean worn curtains hung slack like things exhausted by the heat.

Some papers had been thrust in the tin letter box before the clumsy dark green door, and as Mrs. Farley emerged from the house she stopped to glance at them before descending to the street. One of the papers had a Kansas City postmark and she thought it must have come for her husband from a certain woman whom she was trying to forget. She placed the papers clumsily back where she had found them."