A Hopkins Biography

BOOK REVIEWS portrayal of Besant is somewhat flat and does not convey her vibrant personality and energy. Hence although this is a worthy appraisal of the life of Besant, it does not replace Arthur Nethercott's work as the major source on the career and doings of Annie Besant. Diana Basham's The Trial of Women, which also alludes to Besant's interest and work in the occult through Theosophy, is a very complex study which attempts to relate the late-Victorian "occult revival" to certain "taboos," such as menstruation. As Basham states in her preface, this study attempts "to provide a missing dimension in the history of the Victorian Women's Movement—that of the psychic constituents and fantasy enactments which surrounded discussion of the Victorian "Woman Question' at every stage of its complex evolution. . . ." More specifically, as the cover of the book succinctly explains, Basham contends that, as "the Women's Right [sic] Movement gathered strength and coherence, the advent of Mesmerism, Spiritualism and Theosophy ... revived old notions of female occult power" and that an examination of "these two strands of Victorian feminism" in the literary productions of several Victorian women on female prophecy and power reveals that "the taboo subject of menstruation was the hidden pleader of the "Women Question'." Perhaps more important is Basham's assertion that many Victorian women feminists were, like Annie Besant, also interested in Spiritualism and experiments with Mesmerism and seem to have had their creative efforts inspired by their affinity with the occult. Both studies are well-illustrated and include good indices and informative endnotes and bibliographies, but Basham's effort (perhaps by its very nature) is difficult to read and marred by typographical and spelling errors and some confusion in the sequence of endnotes. J. O. Baylen, Professor Emeritus ______________ Eastbourne, England A Hopkins Biography Norman White. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. xviii + 531pp. $45.00 IN SPITE OF some troubling problems, this biography is a monumental achievement. Drawing on the unpublished papers of Humphry House and considerable research of his own, including many previously unknown or obscure facts and anecdotes about Hopkins and some valuable interpretations, especially of the last poems, White's account of Hopkins's life is often very thorough. Nevertheless, it does not seem 507 ELT 36:4 1993 to me to be the definitive biography we were led to expect. Impressive as it is, it does not displace its near rival, Robert Bernard Martin's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (1991), and plenty of room is left for biographers to come, if only because Hopkins: A Literary Biography does not assimilate and acknowledge most of the North American scholarship on Hopkins, including Martin and the new, definitive edition of the poems. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Norman MacKenzie (of Queen's University, Canada), along with the volumes of Hopkins Facsimiles he edited (none cited by White), provide future biographers with a detailed history of the manuscripts and a differentiation of Hopkins's changes from Bridges. The results are different texts of some of the poems, and notes revealing the history of drafts and copies, along with relevant historical, biographical, theological, scientific , and critical information. To see what difference this edition may make to a biographer let's take one brief example. White simply asserts that certain poems are about Digby Dolben. MacKenzie almost invariably disagrees. In one note MacKenzie acknowledges the scholarship of House and W. H. Gardner who describe "Not kind! to freeze me with forecast" as an intimate comment on Hopkins's presumably homosexual love for Dolben . However, MacKenzie concludes that the poem is a translation of Horace's second Ode, implying that some of the speculation about Hopkins's emotional life needs to be revised. Could White have known the controversy about the poem? MacKenzie presented more detailed discussion of this matter in his essay in Classical and Modern Literature in 1984 (5.1: 7-11) and summarized it in ELN in 1986 (23.3: 41-42). Neither article appears in White's Select Bibliography, though MacKenzie 's Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1981) is included. More importantly perhaps, if White...