Grunwald. Lisa. The Irresistible Henry House.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” Martha Gaines might have used these words from King Lear to rail against the ingratitude of the orphan she kept out of all the “practice babies” used over two decades in her home economics course at all-female Wilton College. How Henry turned out was to a degree Martha’s doing since she taught for years that babies needed foremost to be fed and kept clean instead of coddled into a sense of belonging to another. Now that priority is being proved wrong by science and Martha is dispossessed not only by Henry but also the College in changing times. In his twenties Henry has a relationship with a woman who was also a “practice baby.” Grunwald bases her novel on the actual though little known practice for half a century of bringing orphan infants to campuses for learning homemaking complete with child.
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