In February 1956 FOC began reviewing books for the diocesan paper, yclept the Bulletin. The diocese was the newly-formed Catholic one of Atlanta, whose Bulletin appeared bi-weekly. She found reviewing books for it both a useful discipline (she began it as a mortification for Lent) and a useful source of free books. Her first subject was a volume of Catholic short fiction, but some of the books she reviewed make a pointer to her central concerns. She often reviewed works of theology, including in February 1960The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , which was recently translated into English. She presented him as a poet and visionary, whom poets would recognise at once though scientists and theologians might take time to digest his thought. He became a yardstick for her, often cited and recommended to friends.

JOF published another historical novel involving developments in Roman Catholic Christianity , entitling it The Judas Cloth.

The main character, Maja Carmen Carrera, a black Jazz singer, immigrated from Cuba to London when she was five years old. Pregnant and living with her (white) Ghanaian husband (Aaron, a doctor), Maja struggles to locate herself in her complicated family past (Cuban and British, English- and Spanish-speaking, Santería and Catholic ). Meanwhile the Yoruba goddess Yemaya lives in the somewherehouse, which has one door leading to London and one to Lagos. Yemaya laments the fact that Yoruba gods must disguise themselves as Catholic saints. As such, her migration is just as complex as Maja's. Like The Icarus Girl, this narrative has female friendship at its centre. But this novel is more complex in terms of form, style, and plot.

EP quotes La Rochefoucauld to the effect that true love is that emotion lurking at the bottom of the heart, whose name we do not know. The story is set in France, and features the Count and Countess of Clairvalle, who married for duty, though each was in love with another, grew to hate each other violently, and at last, by way of jealousy, learn to love. When the countess sees her former love, she realises that her feeling for him is extinct. Her husband's encounter with his discarded mistress, on the other hand, produces an outbreak of melodramatic violence (by her against him) at the story's close. She had a revolutionary education, and dresses as a man for her attempt to stab him. This is a novel of ideas, in which English-French and Protestant-Catholic issues are debated. The hero has an intellectual, unmarried sister. An aversion to learned ladies is called the common cant of ignorant men, who feel lessened by a comparison which always renders their own shallowness apparent. Yet the characters of some learned ladies are criticised. The novel's sentiments are liberal but not revolutionary. An English character writes, I am glad we are at peace with the new world; for though so much has been said about America proving an ungrateful child, it seemed always to be forgotten that there could be such a thing as a tyrannical parent. But the school of revolution is implicated in the violence of the woman who tries to kill her ex-lover, and America is felt to be sadly lacking in poetic associations, though Anna Letitia Barbauld (in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven) is mentioned as having tried to provide some for it.

Her first piece of this kind, for Friendship's Offering, 1826, was titled A Tale of Ispahan and designed to supplement an engraving of that town from a sketch by her brother Sir Robert Ker Porter . Though she was a lifelong Protestant Anglican, JP 's personal acquaintance with at least one prominent Roman Catholic family led her to express sympathy in print with members of that religion, writing about the poverty of French priests living in exile in London or about the buildingand consecration of a new Catholic church.

Like much Victorian protest poetry, this volume offers a blend of social critique with religious didacticism. The closing poem, one of those most directly linked to the book's charitable aims, Homeless, deplores a world in which, for women without a home to go to, the Night cries sin to be living, / And the River cries sin to be dead. The speaker satirically observes that criminals, the pampered pets of the rich, and the goods or material wealth of thrifty England, are all sheltered from the dark and the elements, as homeless women are not. It then rises to a simple yet powerful peroration: Our Beasts and our Thieves and our Chattels
Have weight for good or for ill;
But the Poor are only His image,
His presence, His word, His will—
And so Lazarus lies at our doorstep
And Dives neglects him still.

View reference

Procter, Adelaide, and Richard Doyle. A Chaplet of Verses. Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.

126

View scholar note

The closing image refers toChrist's New Testamentparable about the beggar covered with sores who diedand went straight to heaven, while the rich man whohad refused to help him went tohell.

Other poems in the volume are more directly devotional, though An Appeal, like Homeless, makes a political point. It decries The Irish Church Mission for Converting the Catholics: Cursed is the food and raiment / For which a soul is sold; / Tempt not another Judas / To barter God for gold..

MR 's account of her first voyage (based on journals kept at the time) enthusiastically describes tropical birds, flying fish, marine phosphorescence, and waterspouts; the markets, salt pans, and mountains of St Kitts. She reports with approval the activity and productivity of St Kitts, and with distaste the Roman Catholic beliefs and practices of Madeira. According to Melissa Bailes, Riddell follows British systems (those of John Ray and Thomas Pennant ) of classifying animals and plants, rather than that of Linnaeus . She makes no overt comment in print on the institution of slavery, though her letters show her to have been an abolitionist.

Here MR recounts her experiences as a budding writer and a member of the women's movement in London. She writes of her Catholic upbringing, of living in communes and building and surviving relationships. Her narrative, she says, in one sense goes in a straight line, chronologically, charting my rake's progress, but in another sense is a flâneur, circling, looping, and dreaming.

In the body of the novel ER pays little attention to her supposed source. She creates no fictitious narrator, and the style in which she relates the well-known story of Joan, or Jeanne (her peasant youth, her visions, her military triumphs in leading the French against the English, and her trial and execution by the Roman Catholic Church for heresy), is entirely novelistic and entirely of its own age. She begins with a brief survey of the historical background; then minutely describes the market-day bustle in the town of Vaucouleurs, where our chronicle commences; then picks up two people walking home from the market, a middle-aged man, apparently belonging to the lower order of burgesses, and a young peasant girl who would merit a second glance only to a person of particular intelligence or curiosity: Jeanne, who is then minutely described in her turn. Sometimes indeed (as in [t]he reader will scarcely have failed to remark with surprise)ER seems to forget her alleged source altogether.

Anti-Catholic sentiments are related through the vehicle of a romance in which a young Italian-French heroine is persuaded by a suitor to give up her loyalty to a useless priest.

The first of these volumes aims to restore Dante to the general reader and the seeker after religious truth. DLS emphasises his theological content, and offers a simple, incisive account of the Catholic doctrines of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, as well as two especially interesting chapters on his imagery. The second volume (designed to aid the beginner in Dante studies, but also to complement the first) concentrates on Dante's literary-poetic appeal. DLS explores his use of Virgil, compares his work with that of Milton.

JS portrays Portugal too as an unhappy land, full of oppressive regulations and of officers exacting fines and fees from travellers. Upper-class women are virtual prisoners in their homes; marriage without consent is savagely punished, and everywhere is seen the heavy hand of the rich, self-serving, censorious Catholic church , whose manner of worship, she pronounces, is no better than a puppet show.Oh Britons, Britons, little do you know your own happiness! Once she reaches Lisbon a good deal of her closing letter is taken up with conventional sight-seeing and comments on the British colony in the city.

MAS describes several very early writing projects. When her mother gave her a writing-case which locked, to ensure privacy, she spent hours in pouring out the effusions of my own bitter heart, as well as in writing accounts of what had most interested her in her reading. She composed biographies of Sir Anthony Babington (historical defender of Mary Queen of Scots and a Catholic martyr) and of someone she calls John Polly, a traitor to Queen Elizabeth . She wrote these on old paper, imitating the old English character, protectively wrapped and boxed them, buried them with suitable accompanying objects (Elizabethan coins and skulls), and planted oak saplings above the spot. She hoped her works would be found three hundred years later—and presumably that they would then be dated as five hundred years old.

As a member of her community Shirley wrote for the good of that community. Though she professed to judge herself unworthy, she thought it her duty & part to write, hoping to inspire all those that shall hereafter posses her place & offis of government, that they may sett her as a true pattron & example before them. Exposition is as important as narrative in this life, which begins (after the author's address to her readers) with its subject's birth, but ends not on her death but on lengthy accounts of her devotional practices and on the celebrations for her jubilee (marking fifty years since her profession as a nun). As her subject's friend and daughter in religion, ES shows insight into Clement's mind and feelings: the feelings of the child and the young nun as well as those of the revered old woman whom she herself had known. She looks back at the generations of Clement's family as if at her own spiritual genealogy. Sir Thomas More 's household was famous for educating its girls and boys together and in the same way: Catholic heroism seemed to be entailed from the father to his daughters. The eldest of these children was Margaret More (later Margaret Roper ); about three years younger was her relation and honorary sister Margaret Giggs , who became by marriage Margaret Clement and whose eleventh and youngest child was the Margaret Clement of St Ursula's . Margaret Giggs had visited Sir Thomas in the Tower, been present at his execution, gone on to visit other Catholic political prisoners in Newgate Prison (keeping them alive at risk of her own life), and had fled from England to Flanders with her family at the accession of Edward VI on 28 January 1547. ES gives considerable space to her subject's mother, allowing due weight both to her visionary and to her practical or militant life.

The book does not measure up to the force and clarity of the opening. The suggestively-named Deletia Granville is a mysterious, neglected young girl at the outset, pensive and literary, loving sublime nature and her father's books. Living at Granville Abbey, she is oppressed by the despotic, Roman Catholic Lady Valville, and compelled to attend Catholic services although her father was a Protestant. She sees nobody except her tyrant's maid (Mrs Abbot) and the priest's niece, Victoire Maublanc. She faces the prospect of forcible marriage to Lord Valville, Lady Valville's son by her first marriage. Lady Valville meanwhile is affected with partial fits of insanity, given to wandering about at dusk, and raving about torture and spectres. The first volume concludes with Deletia dangerously ill after an abortive escape attempt.

GBS published a somewhat different kind of memoir in All in Good Time, which describes the train of thinking that brought her from the non-practising Judaism of her childhood into the Roman Catholic Church .

AS begins with the feelings that assailed her when she first stood on a summit and contemplated the prospect of transcendent magnificence, the peaks and glaciers of the Alps. Such, she says, is the prospect which she seeks to offer to the mental eye of the religions of the world. She applies the idea of evolution to the mental, not the physical realm, scanning the slow development of religions around the world, and the coincidence of Aryan, Semitic, and African association of the ideas of God with the sun or the sky. She examines different branches of Christianity, evaluating and sometimes criticising the contributions of, for instance, the Catholics and the Evangelicals . She asserts her belief that intellectual freedom is an essential condition of progress, and that therefore the more progressive Christian churches, even if smaller in numbers, are likely to prevail. She rejoices that the lives of the most distinguished representatives of the Free Christian Churches bear witness to the fact that there is no incompatibility between absolute freedom of inquiry and fervent religious faith.

Brocard Sewell discerned in this novel an accurate sketch, under fictional names, of members of Eric Gill 's circle. The protagonist, Cressy, grows up in the stifling and isolated environment of an arts-and-crafts Catholic community presided over by her patriarchally dominating grandfather and serviced by the women of the family, in the village of Quayle, which is set on a hill and reached by a dead-end road. She escapes at the first opportunity into the outside, real, modern world, by marrying David Little. He too has been dominated but in a very different way: as the last son still at home with his mother, Midge, whose husband has also left her, he has been stifled not by austerity but by plenty and comfort. His mother actively though deviously seeks to put the marriage under pressure. Its discomfort, domestic chaos, and failures in feeling and communication are graphically depicted; so is the glitzy, vapid attraction for Cressy of the modern, non-utopian world of television, fast food, and swaggering teenagers in black leather jackets.

Their essays cover a wide range of topics: manslaughter, court-martials, medical science, flogging, cruelty to animals, domestic violence, single mothers, prejudice against Roman Catholics, corporal punishment, servant abuse, and child abuse.

The chronicler acted as scholar, oral historian (using the accounts of eye-witnesses wherever possible), and hagiographer (in the domestic or female tradition). Her story of the nuns' hardships and struggles, their love, humour, and community, is immensely appealing and readable. Her accounts of the former lives of incoming nuns are rich in tales of the heroism of English Catholic mothers keeping their persecuted families emotionally and financially alive.

In this work she drew on incidents from her poverty-stricken youth, and included in it a sneer at the Roman Catholic faith, which she later regretted.

Euphame, while naturally large-minded as well as large-hearted, is a sombre and not always sympathetic character, making a number of anti-Catholic statements, and described by the narrator as judgmental, grave and a little cold-mannered. She is more sympathetic by the novel's end, her trials having taught her a less rigid notion of religion and charity.

PW 's preface notes that adult travel books run to passages of an immoral tendency. Her Seymour family explore Europe: they see a mountain storm in Switzerland and an earthquake in Sicily. The children (one of each sex) produce maps and journals; the adventures tend to happen to the boy. The parents warn their children against prejudice in favour of the familiar, but encourage them to disapprove of Catholic superstition and cruelty. The existence of fairies is denied. Women's riding astride (in Holland) is defended as an acceptable custom because it is safer and more practical than riding side-saddle.

It is set in the late nineteenth-century on the boundary between Westmorland and Lancashire, an exquisite country whose landscape has a profound effect in the narrative. Alan Helbeck, of an old Catholic family, is thrust together with his step-niece Laura Fountain following the death of her infidel father, a Cambridge free-thinker. Laura's sojourn at his ancient home with her step-mother is considered temporary—I must take up a profession, she tells him—but the two disparate personalities are drawn to each other. The ascetic Helbeck, who has remained single and devoted his life and his wealth to the Catholic Church , is torn between it and Laura's wild pagan self that I love—that I desire— while she fights the sense that she is inexorably exiled from him by his religious beliefs; although she finds them repulsive, she finds no weapon against them in rationalism. The conflict of instincts, of the deepest tendencies of two natures is portrayed in painful but compelling detail. The struggle is an eroticized mingling of religion and sexual difference. After an attempt to shoehorn herself into Helbeck's faith, Laura drowns herself in despair, making it appear an accident. MAW wrote later that the character of Laura was, in her inbred, and finally indomitable resistance to Catholicism, based on her own mother , though Laura is a modern sceptic rather than, like Julia Arnold, a passionate Protestant. Laura's character also seems indebted to that of Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy 's recent Jude the Obscure, and her eventual suicide is reminiscent of Ophelia's in William ShakespeareHamlet. But despite the emphasis on landscape, the book is insistently modern: in an uncharacteristically shocking scene, Laura witnesses with horror a worker fall into the furnace in a steel foundry.