Shadows and Images: A Novel by Meriol Trevor (review)

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 1 02 1 Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. 2 Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1985. 3 Apostle of Rome:A Life of Philip Neri, 1515–1595 (London: Macmillan, 1966). 4 The Arnolds:Thomas Arnold and His Family (London: Bodley Head, 1973). 5 The Shadow of a Crown:The Life Story of James II of England andVII of Scotland (London:Constable, 1988). 6 Pope John (Garden City,NY:Doubleday,1967),re-issued as:Pope John: Blessed John XXIII (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000). 7 Prophets and Guardians: Renewal and Tradition in the Church (London: Catholic Book Club, 1969). Shadows and Images: A Novel. By Meriol Trevor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press,2012. Pages:xiii + 278. Paper:ISBN 978–1–58617–602–0.$16.95.Kindle:$9.99. Meriol Trevor (1919–2000) is best known to Newmanists for her monumental two-volume biography: Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud and Newman: Light in Winter,1 which were subsequently abridged as Newman’s Journey.2 Trevor also published biographies of Saint Philip Neri,3 Thomas Arnold,4 King James II,5 and Pope John XXIII,6 as well as a collection of historical essays on “Renewal and Tradition in the Church.”7 In addition, Trevor wrote some forty other books—almost equally divided between historical novels and children’s stories—now nearly all out of print. This book is a republication of a historical novel thatTrevor published in 1960,while she was writing her Newman opus. Trevor’s novel centers on a fictitious Anglican woman,Clemency Burnet,and her journey from Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic Church. Leaving the relative isolation of Cornwall after the death of her father, an Anglican pastor, Clem, as she preferred to be called, moved to Oxfordshire to stay with a relative, also an Anglican cleric. The Oxford-location brought Clem into first-hand contact not only with Augustine, her future husband and a Roman Catholic, but also with John Henry Newman and other figures in the Oxford Movement. The novel’s plot is multi-layered:first is the narrative of Clem’s life:her elopement to Italy where she married Augustine—a marriage which brought her into one of the new industrialist moneyed families; starting and raising her own family; coping with the death of her first child and, decades later, of her husband; and finally, facing old age as a widow and grandmother. Intersecting Clem’s life at judicious times are contacts with Newman: acquaintance with his youngest sister Mary (1809–1828); visits to Oxford during the Tractarian years (1833–1845); wintering in Rome while Newman was studying there (1846–1847) in preparation for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest; buying a house in the Edgbaston-section of Birmingham shortly before the Oratory was established there;sending her son to the Oratory School,etc. Back-grounding the narrative of these events are both ecclesiastical and social concerns: on the one hand, Clem, as a convert experienced anti-Catholic hostility from her Anglican relatives and friends; on the other hand, she was sometimes puzzled, even provoked, by intra-Catholic disagreements, such as the debate about infallibility at the time of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870). Since Clem married an engineer whose family profited from the industrial revolution,she was confronted with emerging social questions about working conditions, fair compensation, environmental pollution, etc. As both the title, Shadows and Images, which is derived from the phrase that Newman chose for his memorial plaque at the Birmingham Oratory,8 and Stephen Dudro’s cover-portrait of a stern-looking Newman make unmistakably clear,Newman 1 03 looms large, though not overwhelmingly, in this novel. The presentation of Newman is sympathetic—as readers of Trevor’s two-volume biography might anticipate; the series of events, while novelized, have an air of historical authenticity and Newman’s conversations, which are often paraphrased from his writings, sound genuine enough. In a way reminiscent of Newman’s novel,Loss and Gain (1848),9 Trevor did a fine job in giving voice to variousVictorian attitudes:the factional dissension within Anglicanism; the hostility of Protestants towards Catholics; the intramural conflict between Ultramontane Catholics and their co-religionists; the voices of the socially concerned against...