Martin Boyne, a forty-six-year-old American engineer who has spent most of his adult working abroad, travels to Europe to meet up with a newly widowed woman he has long been infatuated with. Along the way, however, he befriends a group of seven children—siblings and half-siblings, a product of their rich parents’ many marriages. Despite their fondness for one another, the children expect to soon be separated as their parents remarry. Boyne joins them in an effort to prevent it, and his affections soon turn from the widow to the eldest child, a fifteen-year-old girl named Judith Wheater.
The Children is a sometimes comic, other times caustic indictment of how children are raised as well as of men’s desire for women. It is also an unexpectedly personal book. As she wrote in a letter to a friend, “I was by many years the youngest in our family, & much thrown, at Judith’s age, with men who were my brother’s friends, men 15 or 20 years older than I was, who were, the most delightful of comrades & play-fellows. Looking back now, I see there were Boynes among them, but I was all unconscious then…”
Published in September 1928