Preview: Two by Ward for the Son Rise Morning Show

For your late summer reading plan, we're going to discuss two of Josephine Ward's novels on the Son Rise Morning Show Monday, July 15, after Matt Swaim and Anna Mitchell (and perhaps Paul Lachmann, the Sound Engineer and the first voice I hear when I connect with Sacred Heart Radio on Monday mornings) come back from their summer break. 

I recommend both of these books: One Poor Scruple and Tudor Sunset. 

One Poor Scruple is a contemporary novel of manners/morals at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; Tudor Sunset is a historical fiction set in the last years of Elizabeth I's reign at the beginning of the 17th century (1600-1603).

I reviewed One Poor Scruple here and Tudor Sunset here.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later. 

Since I talked to Anna Mitchell about Josephine Ward's life and significance, I went to Eighth Day Books and bought the book that inspired her to ask me to talk about Ward in the first place: Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know. I agree with Eleanor Bourge Nicholson's comments about these two novels in her essay "Josephine Ward: Transforming a Heritage of Exile". She writes of One Poor Scruple that is an "unequivocally Catholic as well as a masterfully executed novel that well deserves the positive reception" it received upon its publication "by Catholic and non-Catholic readers alike". (p. 15) It might even be a more Catholic novel today since the issue at the heart of Marge's moral dilemma is Catholic moral teaching forbidding divorce and remarriage. She wants to be accepted in British society and does not know how to resist the temptation to a prestigious marriage. Crucially, Marge is not receiving the Sacraments!

Of Tudor Sunset, Nicholson comments "that it brings together the themes that had absorbed Ward throughout her life, especially Catholic identity and its relationship to patriotism and her conviction of the operation of grace." (p. 19) When Elizabeth I is dying, Meg Scrope, who has suffered imprisonment and the threat of Richard Topcliffe's cruel attentions in Newgate Prison because of the Queen's religious policy, prays for her salvation through the grace of God, whispering the Ave Maria at her beside on the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation.

The Josephine Ward novel I hope to see published soon is Out of Due Time, since it deals with the Modernist Crisis as described in yesterday's post on Elizabeth Huddleston's project, “‘A Story of Well-Defined Purpose’: Josephine Hope-Scott Ward’s Social Criticism of Modernism.”