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A Writer or A Religious? Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Dilemma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Kathleen Jaeger
Kathleen Jaeger*
Affiliation:
University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia
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Extract

Discussing the conflict Gerard Manley Hopkins perceived between his two vocations of priest and poet, W. H. Gardner distinguished between ‘character … the stamp imposed upon the individual by tradition and moral training; which may also be desired and self-imposed, … maintained by an effort of the will’ and ‘personality … the free or comparatively untrammeled psychic individuality, that complex of native faculties … which find their expression in art’. Such a dichotomy can also be seen in a less familiar figure, Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–85), a novelist who for decades sought in vain to reconcile the demands of her religious aspirations with her drive for self-expression.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 48: The Church and Literature , 2012 , pp. 271 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012

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References

1 Gardner, W. H., Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844–1889: A Study in Poetic Idiosyncracy in relation to Poetic Tradition, 2 vols (London, 1948), 1: 2–3.Google Scholar

2 Craven, Mme Augustus, Lady Georgiana Fullerton: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1888).Google Scholar

3 Coleridge, Henry James, Life of Lady Georgiana Fullerton, from the French of Mrs. Augustus Craven (London, 1888)Google Scholar. This is not a strict translation, for Coleridge omitted passages from the original and added material of his own.

4 Taylor, Frances M., The Inner Life of Lady Georgiana Fullerton, with Notes of Retreats and Diary (London, 1899).Google Scholar

5 For a brief account with a useful sampling of references, see ODNB, s.n. ‘Fullerton, Lady Georgiana Charlotte (1812–1885)’, online edn, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/articleI02242>, accessed 9 November 2010. For a more extensive, critical account, see Jaeger, Kathleen, ‘Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–1885): A Reassessment’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Dalhousie University, 1986), 18–176.Google Scholar

6 The memoir was written for Maria Giberne, in exchange for an account of Giberne’s role in the Achilli affair, and so cannot date earlier than 1852. Extensive passages from it (the whereabouts of the original are currently unknown) appear in Coleridge, Life, 3–42.

7 Coleridge, , Life, 115.Google Scholar

8 See Altick, Richard, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1901 (Chicago, IL, 1957), 81–140 Google Scholar; Sutherland, John, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London, 1976), 9–40.Google Scholar

9 Lord Granville had retired in 1841, and on leaving Paris the Granvilles and the Fullertons travelled in France and Italy for some months.

10 For examples, see Coleridge, , Life, 157–63.Google Scholar

11 Ibid. 184–5.

12 Stedman, Edmund Clarence and Woodberry, George Edward, eds, Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 10 vols (New York, 1914), 7: 306–7.Google Scholar

13 Coleridge, , Life, 140.Google Scholar

14 Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, The Cold Digger and Other Verses (London, 1872), 24 Google Scholar; cf. Gen. 49: 4a.

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19 For a discussion of the particular appeal of the Exercises to Victorian Catholics, see Ong, Walter J., Hopkins, the Self and God (Toronto, ON, 1986), 4–6, 54–65.Google Scholar

20 Chapman, Ronald, Father Faber (London, 1961), 15.Google Scholar

21 Ibid. 71.

22 Kew, TNA, Granville Papers, 30/29.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.; italics in the original.

25 Ibid.

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27 Coleridge, , Life, 306–7.Google Scholar

28 Ibid. 389.

29 Taylor, , Inner Life, 286.Google Scholar

30 Ibid. 287.

31 The Month was a Catholic review of literature, science and the arts, which ran from 1864 to 2001. Originally owned and edited by Frances Taylor, it was bought by the English Jesuit Fathers in 1865. Taylor always said that Gallwey was its actual founder: see Devas, Francis Charles, Mother Mary Magdalene of the Sacred Heart (London, 1927), 320–1.Google Scholar

32 Gillow, Joseph, Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from the Break with Rome in 1534 to the Present Time, 5 vols (London, 1885–1902), 2: 336.Google Scholar

33 Taylor, , Inner Life, 389.Google Scholar

34 Ibid. 346.

35 Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, A Stormy Life (London, 1867), 535.Google Scholar

36 Taylor, , Inner Life, 375.Google Scholar

37 Craven, , Lady Georgiana Fullerton, 456–7.Google Scholar

38 Ibid. 457. Susan Oldfield was Fullerton’s niece.

39 Ibid. 413–14.

40 ‘Mrs. Gerald’s Niece, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton’, Catholic World 10 (1869–70), 264.Google Scholar

41 Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, Seven Stories (London, 1873), 121–90, at 159.Google Scholar

42 Ibid. 179. Fullerton opposed the republication of Ellen Middleton, and sought to prevent a French translation of her other ‘passionate’ work, Lady Bird (1853).Google Scholar