CHAPTERS FROM CHILDHOOD: Reminiscences of an Artist’s...

CHAPTERS FROM CHILDHOOD: Reminiscences of an Artist’s Granddaughter by Juliet M. Soskice (Turtle Bay Press: $12.95; 223 pp., paperback original). Juliet Soskice was the granddaughter of Ford Maddox Brown and the niece of both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. Long out of print, her charming memoir recounts her childhood in a warmly Bohemian milieu. At 8, Soskice and her cousins became self-proclaimed social reformers, distributing their own anarchist journal in Hyde Park. (She grew up to become a noted translator of Russian poetry.) But the humanistic values she learned at home brought her into conflict with the nuns at the religious schools she attended: “The thing was that I didn’t really believe in hell. I thought if it was true it would have been in all the papers and I should have heard about it somehow.” Soskice’s impish good humor will beguile readers.