"Against the odds" biographies (2)

Lent reflections 
used at St Andrew's Dawson Street Crook by Ray Anglesea

Sunday March 30

Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Our fourth candidate in our Lenten series “Against the Odds” is the priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins became a Catholic in his early twenties and then sought ordination as a priest within the austere and restrictive life of the Jesuit Order. Alas the brilliant student who had left Oxford with a first-class honours degree failed his final theology exam. This failure almost certainly meant that, though ordained in 1877, Hopkins would not progress in the order. In 1877 he wrote God’s Grandeur, an array of sonnets including The Starlight Night. He finished The Windhover only a few months before his ordination. In October 1877, not long after he completed “The Sea and the Skylark” and only a month after he had been ordained as a priest, Hopkins took up a variety of priestly duties as minister and teacher at Mount St. Mary’s College, Chesterfield, later curacies in Mount Street, London, St. Aloysius’s Church, Oxford, then moving to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Whilst ministering in Oxford, he became a founding member of Oxford University Newman Society. In 1884 he became professor of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin.

From his youth he loved the natural world, keenly observing what he saw and expressing this in poetry and drawing. His poetry is quirky and original, reflecting his sense of humour, capacity for wonder and love of language. None of Hopkins’ poetry was published in his lifetime. His major poem the wreck The Wreck of the Deutschland was turned down by the Jesuit periodical he hoped might publish it because of its unorthodox style and complexity. Nevertheless he continued to see his poetry, like his priesthood, as a servant of the sacramental nature of reality, hiding yet revealing the presence of Christ in all things created.

From time to time he suffered from depression and much of his poetry was written in times of immense personal struggle and homosexual desires. Several problems conspired to depress Hopkins's spirits and restrict his poetic inspiration during the last five years of his life. His work load was extremely heavy. He disliked living in Dublin, away from England and friends. His general health deteriorated as his eyesight began to fail. He felt confined and dejected. As a devout Jesuit, he found himself in an artistic dilemma. To subdue any egotism which would violate the humility required by his religious position, he decided never to publish his poems. But Hopkins realized that any true poet requires an audience for criticism and encouragement. This conflict between his religious obligations and his poetic talent caused him to feel that he had failed them both.

Yet God is no less incarnate in these pained words than in his exuberant poetry of earlier days. He died of typhoid at the age of 44. His poetry was later published by his long-time friend and correspondent, Robert Bridges. 

Sunday April  6

George Eliot

Our 5^th candidate in our Lenten series, “Against the Odds,” is the novelist George Eliot. George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, whose novels (we read at school?) include Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner. Mary Anne, or as she later styled herself Marian was born in rural Warwickshire, a setting she returned to many times in her novels. Her personal life was the subject of gossip. She lived with a married man, George Lewis for many years and after his death went on to marry John Cross, 20 years her junior – not easy ground in Victorian England. Her religious journey was equally controversial. Brought up as a middle-of-the-road Anglican, Marian was influenced by her teacher towards moving to a more demanding evangelical expression of Christianity, akin to that followed by Silas Marner before his expulsion from his church. She was at her most autobiographical in Looking Backwards, part of her final printed work Impressions of Theophrastus Such. By the time of Daniel Deronda, Eliot's sales were falling off, and she faded from public view to some degree. This was not helped by the biography written by her husband after her death, which portrayed a wonderful, almost saintly woman totally at odds with the scandalous life people knew she had led.

During her career as a writer, Marian’s reading led her to embrace the findings of a new age of scientific exploration that by their nature challenged the authority of the ecclesiastical establishment. She began to move away from mainstream Christianity, going on to translate Das Leben Jesu by David Strauss, an influential work that cast doubt on the divinity of Christ. Yet at the heart of much of her writing is the personal spiritual journey of ordinary people: their enduring quest to live generously and with integrity, in a way that contributed to the wellbeing of humanity. This search was a constant within Marian’s life, with all its different expressions. In rejecting what she saw as the narrowness of some religious thinking she continued to express her vision of the spiritual dimension of all human existence.

In the 20th century she was championed by a new breed of critics, most notably by Virginia Wolf who called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Twentieth-century literary critic Harold Bloom placed Eliot among “the greatest Western writers of all time.”

She died on 22 December 1880. Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith and her "irregular" though monogamous life with Lewes. She was interred in Highgate Cemetery (East), London in the area reserved for religious dissenters or agnostics, Karl Marx's memorial is nearby. In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established for her in the Poet’s Corner, Abbey.