A Remarkable Life: Maude Royden

Book Reviews and Thomas, modern eye-oriented culture is seen as passive, feminine, and inferior to the assertive mascuHnity of earHer, more auditory cultures such as that of bards. Hopkins uses the word "effeminate" to describe the Pre-Raphaelite poetic stance in contrast with the "manfiness " of Dryden, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan age. Yeats said that he too was originaUy "in aU things Pre-RaphaeUte" and thus felt he had to make a simüar distinction between the "effeminate" Hterature of, say, William Morris and a "masculine" writer in an oral culture such as Chaucer. WhUe Hopkins apparently shares this basic assumption, I would point out that his imagery is more androgynous than either of his supposedly more modern successors, Yeats and Thomas. In the last line from To R. B." which Deane cited, Hopkins identifies his mind as feminine, a metaphor he develops more fuUy in the next quatrain. Nevertheless, although Deane is apparently not concerned with the gender issues implied here, sexism is clearly another Hnk between these three writers and their Celtic precursors. Jerome Bump University of Texas at Austin A REMARKABLE LlFE: MAUDE ROYDEN Sheüa Fletcher. Maude Royden: A Life. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 294 pp. $49.95 ASIDE FROM THE BRIEF biographical sketches of Agnes Maude Royden (1876-1956) in Olive Banks's Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists (I) and the Dictionary of National Biography, 1951-1960, and biographical notices in The Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women and The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography (2nd ed.), there was no detailed life of this remarkable feminist, pacifist, and Christian preacher. The need is now remedied by historian Sheila Fletcher in a thorough, objective, and sensitive chronicle and interpretation of Royden's very full Hfe and times. Supplementing the research of the late EmU Oberholzer, who was particularly concerned with Royden's church work and preaching in the U. S., Fletcher used materials not available to Oberholzer to emphasize Royden's important role in the suffragist movement and in the development of new concepts of motherhood and marriage in the first half of the twentieth century. Ill ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 It is indeed a moving story of the youngest daughter (in a family of eight children) of a wealthy shipowner and mayor of Liverpool who, despite dislocated hip bones which rendered her lame, embarked on a long and active career of selfless service, devotion, and frustrated love. After schooling at the Belvedere High School, the Cheltenham Ladies College, and Lady Margaret HaU, Oxford (where she achieved a good second class honors degree in Modern History in 1899 and formed a Hfelong friendship with Kathleen Courtney), and three years work in a Liverpool women's settlement (where she met the great love of her life, the Reverend G. W Hudson Shaw in 1901), Royden became an unpaid church parish worker and unofficial curate in Hudson Shaw's church in South Luffenham during 1902. She had hoped to join Kathleen Courtney in settlement work in London, but the reactive depression of her mother necessitated being close to home. In her work in Liverpool, Royden was most concerned with the condition and phght of working-class women, the housing of the poor, and the problems of workers in adjusting from rural to urban Uving. In South Luffenham, as in Liverpool, she had to deal with mental Ulness. Shaw, also a very successful Oxford University Extension lecturer, was himself subject to periodic bouts of "exhaustion and gloom" and his wife, Effie, was mentaUy unstable and quite apparently a schizophrenic. But Royden and Hudson Shaw (seventeen years her senior) found solace in each other and feU in love. The story of their long chaste love affair (they either Hved together as a ménage à trois or near each other with Royden helping Effie Shaw to cope with her ulness for forty-two years) was candidly related by Royden in her memoir, A Three-Fold Cord (1947). Almost immediately after Effie's death in 1944, the frail octogenarian Hudson Shaw and Royden married—two months before his death. With Shaw's encouragement, Royden worked in the Oxford University Extension system as a Lecturer in English Literature. It was...