Book Review: Josephine Ward's "One Poor Scruple"

I could not put this book down Saturday afternoon. I bought it at Eighth Day Books that morning, ran a couple of errands after that, and started reading it at lunch. Finished it at 10:45 p.m., well past my usual bedtime! It was compelling, dramatic, and insightful. The blurb almost invites comparison with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, so I'm going to follow that lead to some extent in my review.

The publisher's blurb:

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world.

First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

Since this is novel about a family, the relationships, good and bad, between the characters are consequential for the plot as Ward has woven it. One of the most crucial of these relationships is the one between the protagonist, the childless widow Marge Riversdale and her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law. Her late husband George, whom his mother idolizes, treated Marge badly (details about infidelity, lavish spending--leaving her in debt--abandonment, and a mysterious death are only hinted at), yet his mother blames Marge for not reforming him. Because of this divide, which even the regard Marge feels for her father-in-law cannot mend, she does not have the moral support she needs as she has entered London society. Even a visit to the Riversdale's home in Lancashire, where she intends to go to Confession after some delay, can't provide her refuge because of this rift (on both sides, of course).

I wish there'd been a family tree: these relationships are a little confusing to me! 

It also must be said that the older Mrs. Riversdale, Helen, has no great sympathy for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, Janet, nee Harding, a convert from Broad Church Anglicanism to Catholicism through Saint John Henry Newman! Helen doesn't trust Newman as a Confessor to Janet because he'd been an Anglican too; and she doesn't like it that Janet is reading George Eliot's Adam Bede, details recounted in the chapter devoted to Janet and her daughter Hilda, who will be coming at the Hunt Ball (that must be delayed!). But Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, also a widow, doesn't figure much in the story, except for sending Hilda first to the family home and then to London, and keeping her there in dangers unbeknownst to her mother.

You can see some parallels to the Flyte family divisions in Brideshead Revisited, I think. One huge difference between the two novels is there is little or no humor--certainly no characters like Rex Mottram to provide ridiculous comic relief. The diversions of the world, the desire for Catholics to fit in British society after centuries of recusancy are dangers to the Faith for the characters in both novels. 

The big issue in One Poor Scruple, as in Brideshead Revisited, is that Marge (like Lord Marchmain and Julia), needs to repent and reconcile with Jesus and the Catholic Church. The problem for Marge is that she contemplates marriage to a divorced Lord Bellasis and that her London friends (?), most notably Lady Cecilia Rupert and Laura, Mrs. Hurstmonceaux plot to enmesh Marge: Laura wants her to marry Lord Bellasis, partly to demonstrate her power and partly to force Marge out the "superstition" of Catholicism, while Lady Cecilia wants Lord Bellasis for herself. Marge is no match for these two plotters, but fortunately, her sister-in-law Mary is (no spoiler!)

It's the web of gossip and double-timing that Laura and Cecilia weave that ensnares Marge, Hilda, Marmaduke Lemerchant, and even Mark Fieldes in great moral dangers. Cecilia's efforts to use Hilda, in London for her first Season, are particularly malign. One thing that Marge vows is to never see Laura Hurstmonceaux again, because she's a "heap" of trouble. The three men, Lord Bellasis, Marmaduke, and Mark, are also wrapped up in these plots as Laura and Cecilia find them useful.

Also unlike Evelyn Waugh's novel, this novel has an omniscient narrator, who knows the characters' thoughts and even interprets, for example, Hilda's efforts to write home to her mother, editing her letters as she writes them.

The denouement in One Poor Scruple is more realistic than Lord Marchmain's signed acquiescence to the Sacrament of Extreme Unction because it relies more on Marge's childhood devotion to Our Lady and her battles with her conscience before agreeing to marry Lord Bellasis. It is not quite as miraculous as that Sign of the Cross, but it is spiritually dramatic. And the aftermath of that intervention is congruent with Marge's character throughout the novel: she still struggles to confess her sins.

As Thomas Woodman comments in his Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature, "No plot summary can do justice to the impressive psychological realism and restraint of this work." (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022 Second Edition, p. 25). Ward also excels in the physical descriptions of these people, their looks and mannerisms: they are embodied in my imagination.

I hope the editors of the Catholic Women Writers series, Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, plan to publish more of Josephine Ward's fiction. She is an excellent novelist, based on this example, sympathetic and yet realistic about her characters, and with an eye for social satire combined with excellent plotting (not like Laura or Cecilia, though!).

The title comes from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 in a speech of Portia's at the trial of the bond:

Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much (2275)
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

Highly recommended.