Priestly Fictions: Popular Irish Novelists of the Early 20th Century: Patrick A. Sheehan, Joseph Guinan, Gerald O'Donovan by Catherine Candy (review)

492BOOK REVIEWS Throughout his long life, Hardy was victim of a dialectic between two impulses . There was his emotional attachment to the Christian tradition on the one hand, and on the other his inclination to favor the thinking of suchVictorians as MLU and Arnold, Darwin and Huxley. As for Newman, Hardy read the Apologia pro Vita Sua and made copious notes on all he found inspirational, but he lamented that he found too many "gaps" in Newman's reasoning.Yet to realize how the two impulses operated against each other is to begin to understand how the process affected his attitude toward Christianity and influenced the creation of his best novels, short stories, and poems. In the context of aU the modifications that took place in Hardy's religious reasoning over a lifetime,it is interesting to note that he was granted burial inWestminsterAbbey , an honor denied in previous years to such agnostic luminaries as George Eliot, George Meredith, and Algernon Charles Swinburn. Posthumously Thomas Hardy was united with his Church even though most of his life he had moved phUosophically in the opposite direction. G. A. Cevasco St.John's University, New York Priestly Fictions:Popular Irish Novelists ofthe Early 20th Century:Patrick A. Sheehan, Joseph Guiñan, Gerald O'Donovan. By Catherine Candy. (Dublin:Wolfhound Press. 1996. Pp. 216. IRÄ12.99 paperback.) This is a study long overdue and very much to be welcomed.The Irish Literary Revival ofthe early twentieth century seems so abundant in writers of commanding reputation (e.g., W. B.Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Sean O'Casey even—though he held himself aloof—James Joyce) that it is easy to forget that neither they nor the revival movement itself was very popular in their time. Contemporary readers more often preferred the novels of Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, positive in outlook though also thoughtful, or Canon Joseph Guinan's more resolutely sunny The Soggarth 4roo«.This was CathoUc, indeed clerical, Uterature, meant forthrightly to appeal to the conventions not only of political nationalism but also ofreligious morality then widespread in Ireland,Ln which respect certaLnly it contrasts with the modernist literature ofthe Revival. But clerical Uterature, even more than other forms of popular Uterature, suffers the neglect ofliterary scholars.These tend to cast its value as"mainly historical," however weU disposed they might otherwise be to invoking social history. At the same time, despite the steady blurring of distinctions among academic disciplines , it is stUl unusual for an historian to treat works offiction more than incidentally . AU the more reason, then, to respect Catherine Candy's discussion ofpopular clerical fiction in the final decades of the British Imperium in Ireland at large. Sheehan (1852-1931), Guiñan (1863-1932), and the less popular, anticlerical BOOK REVIEWS493 (and indeed, by the time he began publishing novels,former priest) Gerald O'Donovan (1871-1942) are of decided, Lf "mainly historical," significance. Nearly contemporary with each other (although O'Donovan's first novel appeared the year that Sheehan died), they nonetheless offer quite distinct perspectives on the lives of ordinary Catholics, and especiaUy on those of priests, in their time. Sheehan's sacerdotal characters reflect the mid-nineteenth century in Ireland , much aware though they are (as was Sheehan) that an exposition of Catholic faith more comfortable with complexity would become necessary. The old certainties of thought and behavior puUed strongly aU the same, presenting in Sheehan a steadfast integrity that, combined with considerable narrative talent, drew an audience weU beyond Ireland. He was much pubUshed in America, where his autocratic priests struck a nostalgic chord among many Catholic readers but also attracted OUver WendeU Holmes, a Boston brahmin if ever there was one. Guiñan, on the other hand, was a priest at once simpler and more up-to-date. Kindly, and sentimentaUy content with stock images of peasant and priest, he was less deUcate than Sheehan, and less artistic, sufficiently fortified by faith to confront the ugliness and complexity ofthe modern age, and reduce them to his satisfaction. Both authors seem to late-twentiethcentury sensibilities embarrassingly sectarian: Sheehan typicaUy treats Protestants as curiosities, enduringly mysterious, while to Guiñan they are just the...