James Anthony Froude is best known as a controversial historian and the literary executor and biographer of Thomas Carlyle. He was also, however, an accomplished writer of fiction and editor of Fraser's Magazine for more than a dozen years. His autobiographical The Nemesis of Faith (1849) was burned as heretical by the senior tutor of Exeter College, and remains a remarkably honest--if somewhat sentimental--portrait of the spiritual trials of a nineteenth-century intellectual.

Anthony Froude was the last of eight children born into the Devonshire household of Archdeacon and Mrs. Robert Hurrell Froude. He was a sickly child who at age three, in his own words, "was supposed to need bracing ... was taken out of bed every morning and dipped in the ice cold water which ran from a spring into a granite trough in the backyard." Such harsh, often well-intentioned but ill-advised treatment Froude received from his family throughout...