Word: nettleship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also possesses a daughter named Charlotte, 39, who has been married some 20 years to Horace Nettleship, a dry-as-dust geologist 15 years older than his increasingly unhappy wife. Horace's long research into volcanic lava has convinced him "that Creation has been a more ponderously slow and haphazard process than was suggested by the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis." The resultant loss of his faith in Christianity has left Horace painfully vulnerable to other blows. Bad enough that Charlotte has not spoken to him during the past 15 years of their marriage. Now his son Lionel...
...with Maudie, while her mother decides that this dashed handsome young bohemian's attentions are directed at her. Added to this mix-up are cameo appearances by Victorian notables like Walter Pater, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Huxley. But beneath this sparkling surface roil undercurrents of genuine pain. Nettleship, a figure of fun in all his balding, pedantic outward manifestations, knows himself well enough to realize that he has botched his life and that the gloom he suffered when he could no longer believe in God "earned him the hatred of both his children." His wife Charlotte is scarcely...