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Some Aspects of Modern British Catholic Literature: Apologetic in the Novels of Josephine Ward

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Extract

However strongly some authors may oppose the adjective ‘Catholic’ as limiting their vocation, a recognisable body of British Catholic literature does exist from the mid-nineteenth century. Its boundaries are not always easily definable since its origins are mixed. It was moulded initially by pre- and post-Emancipation renewals, the number and energy of the new converts from the Oxford Movement, the effects of Irish immigration, and the anti-Catholic rhetoric in both Protestant revivals and rising liberal secular thought. As a result British Catholicism formed a distinctive apologetic, which marked its literature from the beginning. Thus, Newman’s Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848) made the case for Catholicism against Elizabeth Harris’s novel, From Oxford to Rome, and in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (1851) he defended the faith during the ‘Papal Aggression’ fury. Similarly, both Wiseman and Newman responded to anti-Catholic caricatures in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1851) with their own fictional depictions of the early Church, Fabiola (1854) and Callista (1856) respectively.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1973

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References

Notes

1 There is the well-known quip of George Orwell that only bad Catholics make good writers (‘The Prevention of Literature,’ Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus [London: Seeker & Warburg, 1968], 4:68–69), but Catholics, too, regularly take up the issue. The best treatment by a British Catholic of the complex relationship between religion and the arts is David Jones, ‘An Enquiry Concerning the Arts of Man and the Christian Commitment to Sacrament in Relation to Contemporary Technocracy,’ in Pakenham, Elizabeth (ed.), Catholic Approaches (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953)Google Scholar. See, as well, the more general reflections by the Catholic poet, Jennings, Elizabeth, in her Christianity and Poetry (London: Burns & Oates, 1965)Google Scholar.

2 No single study of British Catholic literature for this period exists and the definition of the category remains as fluid as it did in Newman’s day: ‘By “Catholic Literature” is not to be understood a literature which treats exclusively or primarily of Catholic matters, of Catholic doctrine, controversy, history, persons, or politics; but it includes all subjects of literature whatever, treated as only a Catholic would treat them.’ (John Henry Newman, Tie Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated, edited by I. T. Ker [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976], p. 247) Although Newman’s definition incorporates all of human experience and writing and offers no clear notes on ‘Catholic,’ it would not appear to include works such as Alexander Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’ (1733–34) despite the author’s religious background, since it is difficult to argue that only a Catholic could have treated the subject matter of the piece as Pope did. On the other hand, much of Chesterton’s work (and others like him) written before his conversion is included as are pieces in the late twentieth century by self-styled ‘lapsed Catholics.’ Nor do all the works embraced by the category treat Catholic themes explicitly. On Joseph Conrad, usually not included in the category, see Lester, John, Conrad and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More difficult is the case of A Simple Story (1791); London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987; Pandora Press ‘Mothers of the Novel’ series) by Elizabeth (Simpson) Inchbald (1753–1821) in which the presentation of Mr. Dorriforth, a Catholic priest, and an implied criticism of the penal laws, foreshadow the works of later Catholic writers. The novel’s narrative as a whole, however, focusses elsewhere and has, not unjustifiably, gained an audience for the book among those interested primarily in feminist rather than other theological frameworks.

A number of surveys, more or less successful, are available. The best is Woodman, Thomas, Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, which provides a good discussion of the genre through the 1980s. See also Calvert Alexander’s more general study, The Catholic Literary Revival: Three Phases in its Development from 1845 to the Present (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1935) and Brown, Stephen J. and McDermott, Thomas, A Survey of Catholic Literature (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1949)Google Scholar. Many treat a wide variety of literary genres and are mere lists of authors. Note Edward Hutton, ‘Catholic English Literature 1850–1950’ in Andrew Beck, George (ed.) The English Catholics 1850–1950: Essays to commemorate the centenary of the restoration of the Hierarchy of England and Wales (London: Burns Oates, 1950), pp. 515558 Google Scholar, and the parallel piece by Dwyer, J. J., ‘The Catholic Press 1850–1950,’ ibidem, pp. 475514 Google Scholar, Note, as well, O’Brien, Conor Cruise, Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1853)Google Scholar. The bibliographic listings by Albert Menendez, J., The Road to Rome: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1988)Google Scholar and The Catholic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1988) include both British and American pieces and little discussion.

3 From Oxford to Rome: And how it Fared with Some who Lately Made the Journey. By a Companion Traveller. [Elizabeth Furlong Shipton Harris (1822–1852)] Ohne Rast—Ohne Hast [Without Rest—Without Haste] (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1847).

4 For Newman bibliography and discussion consult Ker, Ian, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 332–36, 36472 Google Scholar and Gilley, Sheridan, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), pp. 26869.Google Scholar

5 Kingsley, Charles, Hypatia: or, New Foes with an Old Face. Reprinted from Fraser’s Magazine (London: W. Parker & Son, 1853)Google Scholar, Wiseman, Nicholas, Fabiola; or, The Church of the Catacombs (London, Burns & Lambert, 1854)Google Scholar and Newman, John Henry, Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century (London, Burns & Lambert, 1856)Google Scholar.

6 For surveys of Victorian religious fiction generally see Woolf, Robert Lee, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland, 1977)Google Scholar and Maison, Margaret M., Search your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961)Google Scholar. On Evangelical literature see Jay, Elisabeth, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

7 See Ellis Baker, Joseph, The Novel and the Oxford Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932)Google Scholar, Chapman, Raymond, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970)Google Scholar, and Tennyson, G. B., Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Mathew, David, Catholicism in England 1535–1935 Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1936), p. 227 Google Scholar, in his consideration of ‘the question of Catholic contacts from another angle, that of the effect produced by those writers whose influence extended… across other religious and general groupings.’ (p. 226)

9 Mrs. Ward, Humphry, Helbeck of Bannisdale (London: Smith, Elder, 1898)Google Scholar. Citations below are from the edition by Brian Worthington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). The daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mary married Thomas Humphry Ward, son of a Hull clergyman, in 1872. For biography and study see Sutherland, Joan, Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Preeminent Edwardian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

10 Compare the earlier Villete (1853) by Charlotte Bronte, and the comments on it in Mrs. Wilfrid Ward’s introduction to Wilfrid Ward, Last Lectures, edited by Josephine Ward and Maisie Ward (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), p. ix.

11 In Robert Elsmere (London: Smith, Elder, and New York: Macmillan, 1888) Mary Ward traced the spiritual development of a young Anglican priest from a committed pastor to an equally dedicated secular social reformer among the urban working class as he came in contact with the new scientific, historical, biblical, and theological scholarship of the day.

12 Among others note Charles Reade’s popular The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), as well as George Eliot’s Romola (1863), Disraeli’s Lothair (1870), the American Dean Howells’s, William A Foregone Conclusion (1875)Google Scholar—the work was popular in Great Britain, and the Tractarian Joseph Shorthouse’s John Inglesant (1881). Compare as well the American expatriate Henry James’s fascination with Catholicism as described in Fussell, Edwin S., The Catholic Side of Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Among others note Kingsley’s, Charles Westward Ho! Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh’ (Cambridge, 1855)Google Scholar.

14 Note, as well, the work of the American convert Mrs. Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (1867–1906) who wrote under the name of John Oliver Hobbes, and Lucas Malet, pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Harrison (1852–1931), the converted daughter of Charles Kingsley.

15 On Alice Meynell and the circle see Meynell, Viola, Alice Meynell: A Memoir (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne & Jonathan Cape, 1929)Google Scholar and Bandeni, June, A Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell (Padstow: Tabb House, 1981)Google Scholar.

16 See Champneys, Basil, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore (2 vols.; London: George Bell and Sons, 1900)Google Scholar.

17 For these and others including Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), ‘Michael Field’ [the pseudonym of Katherine Bradley (1846–1913) and Edith Cooper (1862–1914)], Oscar WiIde (1856–1900), Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), and The Yellow Book group see Karl Beckson (ed.), Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s (Chicago: Academy Publishers, 1982). For recent and differing reinterpretations of this group see also Kieran Flanagan’s ‘J. K. Huysmans: the First- Postmodernist Saint?’ New Blackfriars 71 (1990), pp. 217–229 and Hanson, Ellis, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

18 The daughter of James Hope-Scott and his second wife, Victoria Howard, Josephine Hope lost both her parents by the age of eight and was raised with her siblings by her mother’s family. Through the Howards she met the son of W. G. ‘Ideal’ Ward, Wilfrid, to whom she was married in 1887. Wilfrid Ward was best known for his biographies of his father, W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement (London: Macmillan, 1889) and W. G. Ward and the Catholic Revival (London: Macmillan, 1893), and above all of Newman, , The Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, Based on his Private Journals and Correspondence (2 vols.; London: Longmans, Green, 1912)Google Scholar. He was editor of the Dublin Review from 1906. For the fullest treatment of the Wards and their associates see the reflections by their daughter, Ward, Maisie, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition: I. The Nineteenth Century, II. Resurrection Versus Insurrection (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1934, 1937)Google Scholar.

19 Unless otherwise indicated references hereafter are to the version, published the year after her death with an introduction by Alfred Noyes as Mrs. Ward, Wilfrid, Three Novels: Out of Due Time, One Poor Scruple, The Job Secretary (London: Longmans, Green, 1933)Google Scholar. For background to the novel see The Wilfrid Wards I, pp. 380–89.

20 See The Wilfrid Wards II, pp. 1–2. Note, however, Mathew’s reading of the period: ‘With the deaths of Cardinal Newman in 1890 and Cardinal Manning in 1892 a change came over the situation. Many contacts with its literary, scientific and intellectual worlds were snapped when Manning’s brougham drove away for the last time from the Athenaeum. Thus Acton had been one of the Cardinal’s least pleasant preoccupations, but there was manifestly no association between the Vaughan régime and the literary activities of the “nineties”.’ (p. 224) The ‘first effect [of Newman’s Apologia] had by now died away.’ (p. 226).

21 On the Wards’ openness to both sides in the controversy see Josephine Ward’s introduction to Last Lectures, p. xxxix. Throughout this paper ‘Modernism’ is used firstly to refer to that movement within the Catholic Church, which sought to accommodate traditional Catholic teaching to modern philosophic movements and historical, social and other studies and which was condemned in 1907 in the decree ‘Lamentabili’ and the encyclical ‘Pascendi.’ Among other works see Reardon, Bernard M. G. (ed.), Roman Catholic Modernism (London: A. & C. Black, 1970)Google Scholar and literature cited. The term was also used to describe similar movements in the Church of England, particularly that of the Modern Church People’s Union (founded 1898), and in this more general sense it is applied to Mary Ward. See Stephenson, Alan M. G., The Rise and Decline of English Modernism: The Hulsean Lectures, 1979–1980 (London: SPCK, 1984)Google Scholar. The term ‘modernism’ (lower case) is used to designate literary modernism in the early twentieth century.

22 On such fictional patterns in the late twentieth-century see Lodge, David, The Novelist at the Crossroads and other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984)Google Scholar and note Linda Hutchinson’s term ‘historiographie metafiction’ in her A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 5. For a review see Holmes, Frederick M., The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1997)Google Scholar.

23 Note as well Philip Gibbs (1877–1962), Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972), and Bruce Marshall (b.1899).

24 Of the post-war writers see Gabriel Fielding [pseudonym of Alan Barnesley] (b.1916), Elizabeth Jennings (b.1926), Peter Levi (b.1931), David Lodge (b.1935), and Piers Paul Read (b.1941), the representati ves of Scottish Catholicism, Muriel Spark (b.1918) and George Mackay Brown (b. 1921), and note the work of Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) and Beryl Bainbridge (b.1933). Among the most noteworthy later writers are Alice Thomas Ellis and Michèle Roberts, and note Peter Ackroyd, Wendy Perriam, and Jill Paton Walsh. Aside from topical comments, more fully developed in several of the novels of David Lodge, Vatican II and its impact on Catholicism generally, plays a relatively minor rôle in the works of Catholic writers. The struggles of members of the latter group referred to here, for example, to understand their communal and personal past are more reasonably understood as shaped by the broader ‘postmodernist’ discourse than by disjunctures in the Catholic tradition following the Council. For further details see my ‘Psychological Integrity and the Reappropriation of the Catholic Past: British Catholic Novelists in the late 1990s,’ The Canadian Catholic Review 16/1 (1998), pp. 3244.

25 The Wilfrid Wards II, p. 110.

26 One Poor Scruple, p. 327.

27 Bergonzi, Bernard, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel,’ in The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 174 Google Scholar on Greene’s novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962; first published 1951). Bergonzi’s essay is primarily directed to the work of David Lodge. The implications of his title are belied by his own fine and under noted The Roman Persuasion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981).

28 Melbeck, p. 39.

29 Note Maisie Ward’s remark concerning her mother’s ‘absolute realism that protected her deeper thoughts from all tinge of sentimentality.’ (p. 108).

30 One Poor Scruple, p. 43.

31 Helbeck, p. 330.

32 One Poor Scruple, p. 27. Compare her similar use of the Transfiguration in Out of Due Time, p. 333 (All quotations to Out of Due Time are to this edition).

33 Compare Mrs. Wilfrid Ward, Horace Blake (London: G. P. Putnam’s, 1913), in which an unbeliever comes to understand the emptiness of his secular gospel and is converted. ‘I have been reading the Gospels for the first time,’ says his wife, ‘and I see that the main notion in them is that sin is not irredeemable. I was taught that there was no such thing as sin, but that there were noble characters and that there were base characters. I never dreamt of the base elements being transmuted into the noblest.’ (p. 418).

34 One Poor Scruple, p. 327.

35 Tudor Sunset, pp. 377–78.

36 Greene, Graham, Brighton Rock: An Entertainment (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943; first published, 1938), p. 249.Google Scholar

37 Meynell, Alice, The Poems (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege and Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 12627.Google Scholar

38 On the Wards’ relationship with Baron von Hügel and his wife Isy, see The Wilfrid Wards II, pp. 489–515. The Wards maintained wide-ranging friendships, not all of whom represented their own positions. They were close to the Gibsons, a family of quite different political and religious opinions from their own. On Marianne Gibson, Josephine wrote: ‘“Joeism” and “Mariannism,” are quite, quite different, but I don’t think the Church will disturb either one or the other while our hearts are true. I am personally quite doubtful of my own infallibility.’ (The Wilfrid Wards II, p. 123) They were neighbours to Henry Harland (1861–1905), author of the widely-read The Cardinal’s Snuff Box (London; John Lane, 1900) and editor of The Yellow Book, and they early knew T. H. Huxley and his wife; Huxley may have served as the basis for the agnostic in Josephine Ward’s Horace Blake. See The Wilfrid Wards II, pp. 130–133.

39 The Wilfrid Wards II, pp. 190–91.

40 Ibidem, p. 558.

41 Ibidem, p. 558.

42 For details see ‘Difficulties in the Encyclical Pascendi,’ The Wilfrid Wards II, pp. 559–62.

43 The work was inspired by a series of lectures by Paul Sabatier in the spring of 1906. Wilfrid Ward, according to his wife in her introduction to his Last Lectures, was ‘amused but indignant’ with the Modernist hero of the novel, (p. xxviii).

44 Alfred Noyes, ‘Introduction’ to Mrs. Wilfrid Ward, Three Novels, p. vi.

45 Out of Due Time, p. 3.

46 Ibidem, pp. 39–40.

47 Ibidem, p. 47.

48 Ibidem, p. 46.

49 Ibidem, p. 53.

50 Ibidem, p. 56; italics mine.

51 Ibidem, p. 117.

52 See Ibidem, pp. 176ff.

53 Richard Meynell, pp. 620–21.

54 Out of Due Time, p. 160.

55 Ibidem, pp. 151, 155. Reference to Augustine, Confessions 1:1 and 9:10ff.

56 Ibidem, p. 321; italics mine. Compare the use of Newman in the book. Paul d’Étranges claims him for his own, arguing ‘much in Newman’s line that they must nevertheless be allowed to proceed in their own way, as their research, although it may lead to temporary error is the only road to scientific truth.’ (p. 75; italics mine) Other than her hint here that d’Étranges is not quoting the Cardinal or interpreting him correctly, Ward leaves the statement to stand until the last page of her work when she calls on Newman once more, this time quoting the Apologia on the man who ‘desires a reformation of an abuse, or the fuller development of a doctrine, or the adoption of a particular policy, but forgets to ask himself whether the right time for it has come.’ (p. 377) Compare as well her use of Newman in her The Light Behind (London and New York: John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1903), pp. 84, 87–89, 180ff.

57 Out of Due Time, p. 175.

58 Ibidem, pp. 324.

59 Ibidem, pp. 323–24.

60 Note the descriptions of Babbington, ‘one of those spirits that live largely within themselves, and therefore see that which is without through a haze or mist of their own moods’ (p. 20) and the martyrdom of Mr. Sherwood, (pp. 78ff.)

61 Benson offers a similar figure in Roger Mallock, his first person narrator of Oddsfish (London: Hutchin, 1924), set in the era of Charles II. An Englishman studying in Rome and sent as a secret agent by the Pope to work at the English Court, Mallock saves the King from political intrigues and is attendant at the King’s death-bed confession and reception into the Catholic Church. Although Hilaire Belloc’s purposes are initially different from those of Benson’s, his Catholic apologia is equally evident at his death-bed scene in his Charles II: The Last Rally (London: Cassell, 1939) as in his earlier ‘essay,’ James the Second (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928). Benson’s own favourite work, The History of Richard Raynal Solitary (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1917), is set in the fifteenth century, but he is not unmindful of sixteenth century England, and makes a prefatory comment that he found the volume in a Roman religious house whither the manuscript was taken during the reign of Henry VIII. The Iatter’s destructive activities were so great, the reader is told, that ‘[a]ll traces… of [Raynal’s] shrine have now disappeared—most likely under the stern action of Henry VIII—and Raynal’s name is unknown to hagiography, in spite of his parson’s confidence as regarded his future beatification.’ (p. 6). The book closes with an English King (Henry VI, Benson suggests) kneeling at the bedside of the dying solitary, (p. 249) thereby hinting at a final return of England to the traditional faith. Benson also projected sixteenth century history in his dystopia, Lord of the World (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908). A supposed look into the twentieth century future, the book is a reflection on the past, a move back to the better ‘recusant’ days. The protagonist’s wife was raised as a Catholic and read the Garden of the Soul. (p. 12) The dominant ideology, Humanitarianism, is Christianity secularised from a Protestant base, the mother of the protagonist returns secretly to the Catholic Church, (p. 55) and the book is fitted with a conspirator who attempts to kill the chief political leader (pp. 50–51) and a Catholic plot like that of Guy Fawkes which is discovered and brings difficulty to all ‘recusants.’ Benson’s Poems (London: Burns and Oates, n.d.) edited with introduction by W. M. are much less successful, as is his recusant play, The Cost of a Crown: A Story of Douay & Durham. A Sacred Drama in Three Acts (London: Longmans, Green, 1910). For some useful insights into his character see his autobiographical Confessions of a Convert (London: Longmans, Green, 1913).

62 Mrs. Ward, Wilfrid, The Shadow of Mussolini (London: Sheed and Ward, 1927)Google Scholar.

63 See her The Plague of his own Heart: A Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1926) and Marriage: A Dialogue on the Christian Ideal (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1928).

64 Elizabeth Jennings, ‘The Inheritors,’ in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), p. 192. Compare also Jennings’s analysis of the temporal relationships with respect to personal and religious life in her ‘Rome—A Quarter of a Century ago’ and ‘Memories of Rome’ in ibidem, pp. 206–7.

65 Petre, Maude D., Modernism: Its Failure and Its Fruit (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1918)Google Scholar.

66 ‘Josephine Ward on Maude Petre’s Modernism, ‘ The Wilfrid Wards II, p. 555.

67 Ibidem, p. 557.

68 The Wilfrid Wards II, p. 533.

69 The description is that of the Catholic convert, Sitwell, Elizabeth, Fanfare for Elizabeth (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 202.Google Scholar As in Ward’s novel (see below), so in Sitwell’s less ambiguous ‘history,’ The Queens and the Hive (London: Macmillan, 1962), the Catholic Lady Southwell is present at the close, although the prayers for the dying Queen are not hers but Cranmer’s and the assurance of salvation is left to words of a contemporary report as she ‘fell into a deep sleep, and drifted far, far away from the land she had loved so well.’ (p. 479).

70 Compare Virginia Woolfs Orlando (London: Hogarth, 1928) and Strachey’s, Lytton Elizabeth and Essex (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928)Google Scholar.

71 On Baring’s interest in history and his sense of historical play see his Dead Letters (London: Constable, 1910) and Lost Diaries (London: Duckworth, 1913).

72 Tudor Sunset, p. 9. Ward’s phrase here is in all likelihood influenced by Wilfrid Ward’s exploration of biography, autobiography, and the novel in his ‘The Methods of Depicting Character in Fiction and Biography. Lectures given at the Royal Institution, 1914–1915,’ in his Last Lectures, pp. 150–230. Compare Maurice Baring’s exploration of the links between individual and corporate human beginnings and ends and the struggle with fusions of biographical, historical and fictional genres in his slightly disguised 1924 autobiography C (foreword by Emma Letley; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), the first person narrator of which is directed to write the protagonist’s ‘story… as a novel, not as a biography,’ (p. xxi) and his dedicatory foreword to a similarly autobiographical novel, Cat’s Cradle (London: William Heinemann, 1925), in which the promised but never explicitly offered moral of the story appears at the close in which historical realities enter as the ‘immortal, indestructible, imperishable Rome’ which ‘will rise again and assume her lawful rights, recover her old domain and be clothed once more with her ancient dominion’ in spite of modernity’s ‘forest of aerials,… fumes of petrol and the smoke of your chimneys.’ (p. xii) For biographical details see Letley, Emma, Maurice Baring: A Citizen of Europe (London: Constable, 1991)Google Scholar and Baring’s autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory (London: William Heinemann, 1932).

73 Tudor Sunset, p. 18.

74 Ibidem, p. 15.

75 Ibidem, p. 16.

76 Ibidem, p. 383.

77 How the Reformation Happened, p. 272. Compare Belloc’s Wolsey (London: Cassell, 1930) and Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury 1533–1536 (London: Cassell, 1931), the introduction to which emphasises that it ‘is not a life of Cranmer; it is a study of his character and motives…’ and is dated on the Feast of the Assumption.

78 How the Reformation Happened, 273. Belloc’s Europe and the Faith was first published in 1920 (London: Constable) and established the basis for his conflict model. See the edition with an introduction by Douglas Woodruff (London: Burns & Oates, 1962). For biography see Wilson, A. N., Hilaire Belloc (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984)Google Scholar. Belloc’s prose style is seen at its best in his early essay, The Path to Rome (London: George Allen, 1902). Note Maise Ward’s critique of Belloc’s view of history in her Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), 131–32.

79 Tudor Sunset, p. 13.

80 Ibidem, p. 12.

81 Note Lionel Johnson. ‘By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross’ and ‘Mystic and Cavalier’ in his Collected Poems, edited by Ian Fletcher (New York: Garland, 1982), pp. 11–12, 24–25. Compare in this regard the Anglican Rose Macaulay’s They were Defeated (London: Collins, 1932), published in the same year as Tudor Sunset, and Macaulay’s appropriately titled Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1953).

82 Ibidem, pp. 17–18.

83 Torch-Bearers, 2: p. 375.

84 Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little Brown, 1945), p. 21.Google Scholar

85 Among her many works, note in particular the sensitive description of Protestant revivalism, The History of Susan Spray: The Female Preacher (London: Cassell, 1931) and Green Apple Harvest (London: Cassell, 1920).

86 See Kaye-Smith, Sheila, Superstition Corner (London: Cassell, 1934)Google Scholar.

87 Helena, p. 265.

88 In Parentheses, p. xi.

89 Ibidem, p. ix.

90 For a similar autobiographical novel see the work of the convert, John (Marguerite) Radcliffe-Hall (1886–1943), The Well of Loneliness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928).