Gerard Manley Hopkins

ELT 42 : 2 1999 ing similar reforms. Wilde is blamed for giving Robins misleading advice , although what he seems to have done is advise her that real, tangible success was to be found only at the major commercial venues —advice that Wilde himself followed. But then Wilde is not "pure" enough and is even chastised, implicitly, for despising "fringe" theatres and their audiences: "the pit full of sad vegetarians, and stalls occupied by men in mackintoshes and women in knitted shawls of red wool" (161). What is striking in Powell's championing of Robins and her endeavors are his glaring omissions and perversion of evidence. Unlike two recent biographies of Robins (which he cites) he omits discussing Robins's curious sexuality, which can be charitably described as somewhat repressed. Michael Holroyd (in his biography of Shaw) goes further and declares "Elizabeth felt convinced that all men were potential rapists." Nor does Powell discuss Robins's affair with William Archer, who did much, silently , to advance her career and objectives, and who is depicted, incredibly , as Robins's protégé! But then acknowledging all this would reveal Powell's own earlier straw men and biased analyses. Even a generally good chapter on stage adaptations of women's novels is marred by sweeping, overwritten generalizations such as this one: "But these dramatizations of women's fiction have attracted little or no attention. Like most adaptations for the stage, and most nineteenthcentury plays in general, their texts survive only in rare acting editions or manuscripts. Cumulatively, however, these adaptations of women novelists represent a massive assault against women writers that is both textual and sexual in nature" (101). Most nineteenth-century plays have been consigned to oblivion because they are, intrinsically, not worth reading, despite their authors' gender. Actually if anyone wants to read them they are accessible in microform (albeit in acting or manuscript versions). Powell's declaration of an organized (and presumably institutionalized) "assault" on women writers is simply beneath comment . J. P. Wearing ------------------------ University of Arizona Gerard Manley Hopkins Margaret Johnson. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 1997. viii + 310 pp. $67.50 THE FIRST QUESTION many readers will ask when they see this book is what does the word "Tractarian" mean here. Peter Knockles in 232 BOOK REVIEWS The Oxford Movement in Context (1994) insists that one must distinguish between Tractarianism, Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, and "High Church," but, like most of us, Johnson does not make such distinctions . Knockles lists Newman, Froude, Keble, and Pusey as the leaders of the Tractarians, but Johnson's focus is on "the poetic and theological affinities between Hopkins' work and five Tractarians whose works were known to him": Keble, Richard Watson Dixon, Christina Rossetti, Digby Dolben, and Newman. Johnson makes important connections between Hopkins and Keble, and Hopkins and Newman (especially his Grammar of Assent). She also discovers interesting parallels between the poetry of Hopkins and Froude and the devotional resolutions recorded in their Oxford notebooks. Pusey is conspicuous by his absence. Johnson reminds us that "when Hopkins arrived at Balliol in 1863 the only original Tractarian still at Oxford was Edward Pusey, who continued to advocate Tractarian concerns with the assistance of his protégé, Henry Liddon." She points out that Hopkins attended both "Liddon's and Pusey's sermons" and participated in the ritual confessions they encouraged. She even speculates that when Hopkins included Tracts for the Times in his list of works to be read he was more interested in Pusey's contributions than Newman's. Her bibliography includes Jude Nixon's Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries (1994), which devotes a chapter to Hopkins and Liddon , as well as my Gerard Manley Hopkins (1982) in which I point out that "Pusey was Hopkins's first confessor, Hopkins attended his lectures on Old Testament types, and even after his conversion Hopkins stated that he revered him 'most of all men in the world.'"Yet the affinities between Hopkins and Pusey remain to be explored. Johnson's list of Tractarian poets "whose works were known to" Hopkins is controversial not only because of who she excludes but also who she includes. Her primary evidence for identifying Dixon...