Christian Lady Research Articles

Realism Vs Magical Realism in Mohammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Mohammad Hanif presents feminist approach in his Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) with the empowerment of the protagonist by using the techniques of realism and magical realism. This article aims at exploring the techniques of realism and magical realism which go side by side in the narrative to turn a downtrodden Christian lady Alice Bhatti to attain the status of ‘Our lady’. Using the technique of realism Hanif depicts a society which never misses a chance to dominate a lady from a poor class and minority religion. He shows multifaceted personality of Alice Bhatti and her resistance against social and religious injustices done to her. He foils the patriarchal authority by fusing magical realism in Alice’s character for the restoration of her feminine pride and eminence in a male dominated society. Hanif presents Alice as a saint in the end with the help of magical realism. The maltreatment of Christian choohras is an example of Muslims’ prejudiced behavior towards minorities of Pakistan.

Atrazine residues in Irish potatoe (<em>Solanum tuberosum</em> L.) varieties from three selected areas in Plateau State, Nigeria

Atrazine is a pre-emergent herbicide used for the control of broad-leaf weeds that has residual activity in the environment. Extensive use of atrazine (strength of 800 g/kg Atrazine 50% WP) in Irish potato production in Plateau State, Nigeria has prompted this study to evaluate the atrazine residue levels in Irish potato varieties in three selected (Mangu, Jos South and Bokkos) areas of Plateau State. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted to determine the types and extent of herbicides used by farmers cultivating Irish potatoes. Samples of four Irish potato varieties: Diamant, Marabel, Christian Lady and Yellow and soils at 0-15cm depth were collected from each of the three Local Government Areas (LGAs). All the samples were subjected to chemical extractions using standard procedures and the extracts were analyzed for atrazine residues using spectrophotometer. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and ANOVA at p=0.05. Results showed 63.6% of farmers using synthetic herbicides on their farms, while 76.27% used atrazine as their preferred herbicide over paraquat 23.73%. Soil samples from Mangu had significantly highest value of 9.98 mg/kg of atrazine residues and from the Diamant variety with no detection of atrazine in soil samples from other selected LGAs and their respective varieties. The Yellow variety from both Jos South and Bokkos had the highest values of 3.32 mg/kg and 3.13 mg/kg atrazine herbicide residues, while the least value of 1.51 mg/kg was from Diamant variety in Bokkos. However, trazine residue was not detected in Yellow, Marabel and Christian lady varieties from Mangu, Jos South and Bokkos, respectively. This study showed high atrazine residues with concentrations above 0.05 mg/kg and 0.1 mg/kg (US EPA acceptable maximum residue level) in the soil and Irish potato samples, respectively. This atrazine pesticide over time could lead to bioaccumulation in living organisms, food chain and ecosystem.

Realism Vs Magical Realism in Mohammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Mohammad Hanif presents feminist approach in his Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) with the empowerment of the protagonist by using the techniques of realism and magical realism. This article aims at exploring the techniques of realism and magical realism which go side by side in the narrative to turn a downtrodden Christian lady Alice Bhatti to attain the status of ‘Our lady’. Using the technique of realism Hanif depicts a society which never misses a chance to dominate a lady from a poor class and minority religion. He shows multifaceted personality of Alice Bhatti and her resistance against social and religious injustices done to her. He foils the patriarchal authority by fusing magical realism in Alice’s character for the restoration of her feminine pride and eminence in a male dominated society. Hanif presents Alice as a saint in the end with the help of magical realism. The maltreatment of Christian choohras is an example of Muslims’ prejudiced behavior towards minorities of Pakistan.

Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England by Georgiana Donavin (review)

Reviewed by: Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England by Georgiana Donavin Frances Beer Georgiana Donavin. Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 315. $69.95 cloth. As Georgiana Donavin points out in her introduction to Scribit Mater, Marian studies have undergone some notable changes in the course of the past half-century, with many postmodern critics treating the emphasis on Mary’s virginity as signal evidence of patriarchal misogyny, its determination to encourage women’s passivity, and the repression of female sexuality. More recent scholarship has aimed to reconsider and to recuperate Mary’s authority within the Christian tradition, and has relied on a wide range of medieval Marian literature. This scholarship [End Page 302] has also revisited the entire ideal of virginity, which, it has argued, may in fact be seen as empowering. We all remember from Hali Meiðhad the vividly portrayed woes of marriage and the attendant advantages of virginity. In the literature considered by Donavin, the sapient Virgin is shown not only to be free of the duress of the conventional married state, but also to be enthroned as the inspiration for the trivium: “a steeping in Marian language … resulted in representations of the Virgin as a purified grammarian, an accomplished rhetorician, an inspired muse, and a mentor for writers” (17). Donavin’s introduction is thorough in its presentation of the points that will be made in the course of her study’s six chapters, which cover a wide range of medieval English literature, from “The English Lives of Mary” to “Margery Kempe and the Virgin Birth of her Book.” At the introduction’s close, Donavin explicitly challenges “the paradigm of Kristeva’s abject mother,” as she announces her own determination to counter the “scholarly denigration of medieval constructs of virginity.” Scribit Mater “represents the Virgin as a powerful linguistic intermediary and occasionally as a force for a radical literature that realigns spiritual and social roles” (26). Indeed, Donavin’s work proves to be an effective refutation to the commonly accepted stereotype of the submissive Mary. Her goal is clarified by the first sentence of her first chapter: “[In the course of this book] I will show how throughout medieval English literature, the Virgin Mary is associated with academic and narrative arts of speech, … her superior knowledge and its impact on salvation history” (27). Specifically, the chapter is dedicated to a consideration of a variety of lives that focus on Mary and her “superior spiritual understanding” (74). In the English lives considered by Donavin, the Virgin is anything but a passive vessel: she explains the Christian mysteries, and is the crucial “vehicle for Christ’s coming to earth, … a teacher of providence’s progress” (29, 30). Her virginity is an active source of strength. The chapter covers a broad chronological period, from the Anglo-Saxon Advent Lyrics to Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. While this might at first seem a rather wide net to cast, Donavin, to the contrary, convincingly establishes a pervasive tradition that “illustrate[s] the divergent audiences—ecclesiastical and lay, courtly and popular—that took Mary to be the mother of wisdom” (28–29). Scribit Mater’s next chapters deal with John of Garland and his pedagogical [End Page 303] poetry: Walter of Wimborne, John of Howden, and Richard Rolle, and how they contributed to “northern medieval English traditions for a Marian meditative poetry” (115); and “Chaucer and the Dame School,” in the “era when primary education took place under the Virgin Mary’s wing” (163). Donavin focuses on Garland’s Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie and Parisiana poetria, both of which reveal the Virgin to be instrumental in the teaching of the liberal arts, and of writing itself. “[His] Mary—his book, muse, and teacher—embodies both Wisdom and Word, attributes of Christ, as she bears the Christ child” (113). Garland, attributing his own rhetorical powers to the Virgin’s inspiration, figures her “as a warrior for Christian virtues [whose] divine message … depends on conquering the vices”—“an icon of … learning and a Christian Lady...

DINAH MULOCK CRAIK AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES: PAGES FROM PETTITT'S ANNUAL DIARY

While Dinah Maria Mulock Craik is often classified with Charlotte Mary Yonge as a “Christian lady novelist” of the nineteenth century, the reductive meanings which may be derived from that category are easily overturned by her complicated and adventurous life, non-traditional marriage and motherhood. Craik's unpublished diaries offer intimate glimpses of the strategic or tactical feminism of her daily life, which was similar to that of many women today with its braided strands of work, motherhood and marriage. They also give compelling sketches of events that are both personally and historically interesting, such as her assistance with William Holman Hunt's elopement with his deceased wife's sister and, later, with his recuperation from typhoid fever.

"Embodying Facts": Anxiety about Fiction in The Christian Lady's Magazine and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Social-Problem Novels

"Embodying Facts":Anxiety about Fiction in The Christian Lady's Magazine and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Social-Problem Novels Joanne Nystrom Janssen (bio) As a seven-year-old child, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790-1846) first encountered Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Because she was sick and could not attend the play with her brother, she instead read it at home in a quiet corner, savoring the experience. Fascinated with the character of Shylock and captivated by the story's excitement, Tonna read through the book's pages all night long. This incident, she explains later in her memoir Life of Charlotte Elizabeth, influenced her for many years afterwards. But unlike the positive stories many people tell about their first encounters with life-changing books, Tonna describes the experience as a dangerous moment of temptation, calling books "pernicious sweets" and "polluting idols."1 She also bewails the book's influence, saying, "Oh, how many wasted hours, how much of unprofitable labor, what wrong to my fellow-creatures, what robbery of God, must I refer to this ensnaring book!"2 Her negative response to The Merchant of Venice relates partly to what she sees as its disastrous effects: instead of wanting to read Bible stories, she began to yearn for Shakespeare, and rather than being satisfied with reality, she began to crave romance. With such a view of literature's evils, it is surprising that Tonna not only went on to write pamphlets, treatises, and periodical articles, but also social-problem fiction. In fact, she became one of the first authors to fictionalize the plight of women and children in her industrial novels Helen Fleetwood and The Wrongs of Women. Ivanka Kovačević and S. Barbara Kanner argue that Tonna was a pioneer in social-problem fiction, breaking [End Page 327] ground for later authors such as Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, and Elizabeth Gaskell. They explain: "She was the only author of her generation to write a novel wholly about the lives, at home and at work, of factory operatives and the first to introduce a working-class heroine into an English novel."3 In addition, Deborah Kaplan notes that Tonna was one of the first writers to apply to female factory workers a middle-class ideology of domesticity, which emphasized innate femininity and domestic roles, and to "attempt to inform upper- and middle-class women about the lives of working-class women."4 Not only was she inventive, she was successful: Kovačević and Kanner point out that her publishing history, which includes American editions of several of her works, suggests a transatlantic reputation.5 Her complete works were also published in several editions in the United States, including a three-volume set in 1844 with an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In spite of her fictional innovation and achievement, Tonna consistently expressed discomfort with the use of fiction in her novels, displaying an unease reminiscent of her childhood response to The Merchant of Venice. In her fiction, she inserts factual claims and documentary evidence, such as data and testimony gathered from official reports, that suggest uncertainty about fiction's ability to capture truth, and her characters both value and fear the written word's power, signifying ambivalence about fiction's moral and spiritual influence. This unease is also evident in her avoidance of artistic devices; Kovačević and Kanner point out that her novels lack "metaphor, symbolism, or imaginative leaping and lingering," qualities often synonymous with fictional writing.6 Critics cite various reasons for Tonna's ambivalent relationship with fiction: Christine L. Krueger attributes her discomfort to her alignment with nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity, which was "deeply suspicious of fiction,"7 whereas Joseph Kestner argues that her inclusion of documentary evidence was a rhetorical strategy to "[lend] conviction to the tale."8 While both reasons hold merit, they do not address the complexity of Tonna's relationship with fiction, nor do they fully place her work within the context of The Christian Lady's Magazine, a monthly periodical aimed at middle-class British women that she edited from 1834 to her death in 1846. In this role, Tonna wrote and edited articles that explored what made writing, especially Christian...

The Conversion of Hideyoshi’s Daughter Gō

Despite the drastic curtailment of missionary activity in Japan that resulted from Toyotomi Hideyoshi's ban on Christianity in 1587, letters of the Jesuit missionaries reveal that the ban did not prevent the conversion of one lady, Go, a woman of the Maeda house and Hideyoshi's own adopted daughter. This study explores the circumstances of Go's exposure to Christianity in Osaka both before and after the enforcement of the anti-Christian decree. It also traces her life story in Bizen and Kyoto, where she was converted to Christianity by a woman catechist. Go's story is important not only for her association with Hideyoshi, but also as a case study for the religious communities and practices that formed among upper-class women in late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Japan. KEYWORDS: Christianity - conversion - Toyotomi Hideyoshi - Kyogoku Maria - Christian century - Sengoku period (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Toyotomi Hideyoshi ... (1536/7-1598)1 and Kitanomandokoro ... (1549-1624)2 adopted a daughter, Go ... (1574-1634), and raised her as their biological in Osaka castle. Hideyoshi himself referred to Go as his beloved child (hizo no ko ...),3 and she kept in contact with her parents even after she left home for marriage. Among the other adopted children of Hideyoshi, Go's life story contains one event of significant historical importance: in her early thirties, Go converted to Christianity. The fact that a daughter of Hideyoshi, the man who issued the first anti-Christian policy in Japan, became a Christian is remarkable, and in this essay, I examine when and how Go became interested in the newly arrived religion that was banned by her father. The historical sources that directly recorded Go's life story are not abundant. However, Jesuit missionaries wrote about her conversion, and the descriptions of her relatives and acquaintances are rich and detailed enough to trace the path of Go's life. To begin with, we have glimpses of her early experiences in Osaka both before and after the enforcement of the anti-Christian decree. When the Jesuits arrived in Osaka in 1583, Christianity became something of a vogue in the castle with the presence of Christian lady attendants and catechists, including Kyogoku Maria ... (d. 1618). In response to the anti-Christian edict, Jesuit missionaries consulted Go's mother, who tried to persuade Hideyoshi to reverse his decision. Then, in the following year, Go married Ukita Hideie ... (1572-1655) of Bizen ..., and left the Toyotomi house. Her husband and mother-in-law in Bizen were supporters of Christianity, and the area began to have many Christian converts thanks to the understanding and support of Go's new family. Finally, while she stayed at her mother Kitanomandokoro's residence in Kyoto after the battle of Sekigahara ..., she converted to Christianity under the influence of a woman catechist, and was given the Christian name, Maria. Being a Christian, she eventually moved to her biological family's house in Kaga ... where the Kanazawa church ... was flourishing as one of the most vibrant Christian churches in Japan (MATOS 1996, 96). As a national policy, Hideyoshi's anti-Christian edict of 1587 has received adequate scholarly attention among historians.4 In order to take this discussion one step further, the lives of the women who associated with Christians or engaged in missionary activities should be examined since it was not only Christian daimyo or male Christians who were affected by the anti-Christian policy. Both Jesuit missionaries' records and their letters sent to Europe, there were many Christian and non-Christian women involved in the issue.5 In particular, the Jesuits' connection with women in Hideyoshi's castle, communication with Go's mother, Kitanomandokoro, and acknowledgement of the woman catechist for Go's conversion widen the scope of studies of the sixteenthcentury Jesuits and the lives of women. …

CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH TONNA AND THE MOBILIZATION OF TORY WOMEN IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND

This article addresses the historiographical neglect of tory women in the early Victorian period. The existence of a vibrant culture of female conservative letters, combined with the widespread participation of women in ultra-Protestant pressure-group politics, is suggestive of the neglected contribution women made to the revival of grass-roots toryism during these years. In particular, it is suggested that a consideration of the distinctive features of premillenarian Evangelicalism enables a more discriminating approach to the impact of Evangelicalism upon contemporary women. By focusing upon the career of the prominent premillenarian Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and her editorship of the Christian Lady's Magazine, it is argued that contemporary attitudes towards ‘female politicians’ were far more flexible, variable, and contingent than is frequently assumed. The associational activities with which many premillenarians were involved, combined with their attention to Old Testament models of publicly active women and the sense of urgency that distinguished their theology, frequently led its adherents to problematize and critique existing formulations of women's roles.

Beautification through Beautification: Poetry in The Christian Lady's Magazine, 1834-1849

The devotional verse of a few Victorian women succeeded inreaching a mammoth and mammothly approving audience. Frances Ridley Havergal, Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander, and Sarah Flower Adams, for example, wrote religious lyrics in the form of hymns, which as the nineteenth century progressed grew in popularity in dissenting, Evangelical, and even eventually High Church congregations. Numerous volumes of hymns appeared well before the 1861 Anglican standard, Hymns Ancient and Modern; such hymns as Sarah Flower Adams' "Nearer, my God, to Thee" and Mrs. Alexander's "All Things Bright and Beautiful" were profound popular successes. However, many other more obscure Victorian women were also writing devotional verse, for different kinds of audiences, in different media. Cynthia Scheinberg's important Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England presents an urgent demand for a new analysis of women's devotional verse, an examination that sets aside "an exclusive focus on gender [for] a more complex analytical model that allows for the structural influence of both gender and theology on women's poetry."1 This article argues that examination of the complex artistic and spiritual ambitions articulated in Victorian periodical verse will also help to illuminate the important and under-regarded influence brought to bear by women's devotional poetry on Victorian poetic and religious discourse. This inquiry into the cultural contribution of little-known devotional women poets may perhaps take its bearings from the foremost female devotional writer of her time, Christina Rossetti (herself a composer of hymns, a number of which are still familiar to twenty-first century churchgoers). In recent years scholars have begun reading Rossetti's devotional prose and poetry for the provocative ways in which these writings negotiate with their biblical sources and work to incorporate rather than cancel out female experience. Joel Westerholme argues persuasively that while Rossetti disavows originality and authority in her devotional prose, her disclaimers are disingenuous: "She deprecates the scholarship she lacks, cites examples [End Page 261] of women's preeminence over men, and willingly contradicts other interpreters of the [biblical] passages."2 In her study of the devotional prose, Lynda Palazzo emphasizes Rossetti's imaginative engagement with the scriptures, her foregrounding of figurative language, and the individual imaginative response coming out of individual (gendered, and feminine) experience.3 And Linda Peterson argues that Rossettiworks forsimilar ends in her narrative poems, in order to show that "a female heroine and, by implication, a female artist—might be an active and original reader, interpreter, and creator of biblical types."4 These critics are helping to repair the neglect of an under-read and tantalizing aspect of Rossetti's oeuvre, but they are also contributing to the re-examination and reevaluation of the role of devotional writing in the Victorian period. The devotional prose commentaries that flourished in the nineteenth century were writings on and about scripture that, as Robert Kachur has demonstrated, posited sources of spiritual authority other than scholarly learning, and offered, rather than orthodox exegesis, readings that helped believers know what to do and how to feel in the exercise of their faith.5 Victorian women seized the model of the devotional commentary to empower themselves to overcome the social limitations on engagement with sacred topics. Women's translations of prose devotional commentary into poetic form, I argue in this article, enabled them further to construct relationships, between themselves and sacred knowledge, and between themselves and God, that went beyond those available in prose form. In their use of poetry to explore a personal engagement with religious mystery, Rossetti, women hymn-writers, and the mostly anonymous devotional poets whose verse I read in this article betray a profound debt to the expressive model provided by Tractarianism. Tractarianism, as John Shelton Reed and David Hilliard have shown, helped to feminize the face of Church of England worship, elevating the sacramental, aesthetic, and emotional aspects of religious practice.6 Most importantly for this study, the aesthetics of the movement...

The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth Century

AbstractScholars of American religion are increasingly attentive to material culture as a rich source for the analysis of religious identity and practice that is especially revealing of the relationships among doctrine, bodily comportment, social structures, and innovation. In line with this focus, this article analyses the ways nineteenth-century African American Methodist women turned to dress as a tool to communicate religious and political messages. Though other nineteenth-century Protestants also made use of the communicative powers of dress, African American women did so with a keen awareness of the ways race trumped clothing in the semiotic system of nineteenth-century America. Especially for women entering into public fora as preachers and public speakers, dress could act as a passport to legitimacy in an often hostile setting, but it was not always enough to establish oneself as a Christian lady. Considering the related traditions of plain dress and respectability within the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, this essay finds that AME women cultivated respectability and plainness within discourses of authenticity that tried—with some ambivalence—to use dress as a marker of the true soul beneath the fabric. Based primarily on the autobiographical and journalistic writings of women such as Jarena Lee, Amanda Berry Smith, Hallie Q. Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, as well as accounts from AME publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Church Review, and other church documents, the essay also draws on the work of historians of African American women and historians of dress and material culture. For nineteenth-century AME women, discourses of authenticity could be both a burden and a resource, but either way they were discourses that were often remarkably critical, both of selfmotivation and of cultural markers of class, race, and gender in a world that made a fetish of whiteness.

CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH TONNA, PRE-MILLENARIANISM, AND THE FORMATION OF GENDER IDEOLOGY IN THE TEN HOURS CAMPAIGN

FINALLY PASSED IN 1847, the Ten Hours Bill restricted the number of hours worked by women and children in the factories to ten per day. Its enactment was the result of a lengthy political crusade whose chief parliamentary spokesman had been the Tory M.P., Lord Ashley. A decade later, in his two-volume History of the Factory Movement, Samuel Kydd (or “Alfred”) made a cursory, half-sentence reference to the “useful” contribution made to the campaign by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood (295).Tonna's dates are 1790–1846. Appearing as a novel in 1841, Helen Fleetwood was first serialised between September 1839 and March 1841 in the Christian Lady's Magazine (edited by Tonna 1834 to 1846). Written to persuade her female readership of the urgent need for a Ten Hours Bill, the novel depicts the devastating spiritual and physical consequences of factory work on the eponymous heroine and her adopted family. While Kydd acknowledges Tonna's contribution, the brevity of his remark suggests that her status in the Ten Hours Movement was, at most, ancillary. Kydd seems unaware of the articles about the Ten Hours Bill that Tonna wrote in her magazine. Nor does he refer to her work of 1843, “The Forsaken Home,” which portrays the calamitous domestic consequences of the long hours worked by factory women.This is all the more surprising when one considers Kydd's friendship with the Movement's extra-parliamentary leader, Richard Oastler (Driver 518). “The Forsaken Home” is the second of four stories by Tonna, each published as a separate book under the collective title The Wrongs of Woman (1843–44). The stories were published in the following order: “Milliners and Dress-Makers” (1843); “The Forsaken Home” (1843); “The Little Pin-Headers” (1843); “The Lace-Runners” (1844). Although Tonna continues to be critically obscure, recent literary historians have registered the full range of her writing on the Ten Hours Movement.It is important to acknowledge the work of literary historians such as Fryckstedt, Kestner, Kovacevic, Kanner and (in particular) Neff, which first began the process of raising Tonna's critical profile. Nonetheless, they have perpetuated Kydd's perception of her minor role by persistently characterizing her as meekly following where Ashley led. Wanda Fraiken Neff, for example, depicts Tonna as his “faithful” supporter, someone who “reflected his views” (35, 68). Similarly, Joseph Kestner describes her as having merely “accepted Ashley's fervid word” (93).

“Right here is a good Christian lady”: Reported speech in personal narratives

The personal narratives told by a North Carolina woman contribute to our understanding of both the relationship of personal narratives to the overall speech economy of an area and gender‐specific narrative technique. Reported speech provides the means for this narrator to bring local speech practices into her stories where they support her claims for individual worth and the value of women's work without directly contravening local prohibitions against self‐promotion. Bessie Eldreth's narrative style displays features previously attributed to both male and female narrators in Anglo‐American culture, suggesting how she works strategically within the formal and moral structures available to her. By combining a performance approach and a close analysis of narrative structure with an understanding of cultural background, this analysis reveals that the relation between community norms and the individual goals of a teller of personal narratives may be more problematic than usually described and that reported speech is a powerful tool for negotiating such conflicts.

FABIOLA, A FOURTH CENTURY ROMAN LADY, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRST PUBLIC HOSPITAL

Public hospitals for Roman citizens were established in many Roman cities during the early Christian era; the first of which was established at Rome in the fourth century by a Christian lady named Fabiola, as follows. The origin of public hospitals is remarkable, and not generally known. Ecclesiastical history informs us, that this, perhaps the grandest and most successful effort for alleviating human misery, arose from no common species of benevolence, but from the impulse of singular piety upon the sensibility of a female mind, softened by a series of domestic afflictions, and urged by the desire of atoning for imaginary guilt. In the fourth century, a Roman lady, of a noble birth, by name Fabiola, by religion a Christian, left by the death of her husband in sole possession of an affluent fortune, was the first who built an infirmary for the reception of the sick and houseless, where they were supplied with every comfort. Jerom[e] calls her the glory of the Christians, the wonder of the Gentiles! The account which he gives of her is this: Divorced from her first husband, who proved an abandoned libertine, during the life of the first she married a second husband, who was sincerely attached to her, and whom she survived. Among the melancholy reflections consequent upon his death, being led to conceive her second marriage criminal, she voluntarily underwent a solemn penance, assumed the plainest dress, defaced her beauty, submitted to the meanest drudgery, sold her estates, which were answerable to her noble birth, and converted them into money, for the relief of the poor, and was the first to build an infirmary, into which sick and distressed objects of every description were collected from the streets. Many who were afflicted with distempers, the most loathsome and offensive she attended in person, carried them in her arms, bathed their sores, moistened the lips of the dying with her own hands, and so tenderly assuaged their miseries, that many who were well envied the sick. Rome was a scene too confined for her charity; she visited, either in person or by her deputies, all the country round, and even crossed the sea in quest of new objects of compassion. At length she took a sudden and unexpected resolution of visiting Jerusalem; on which occasion she was entertained a short time by Jerom[e] in his retreat in Bethlehem. She returned to Rome, and devoted all her property and all her time to relieving the sick and the indigent till she died. Her funeral is said to have been attended by a more numerous concourse, and with a zeal infinitely more fervent, than the triumphs of Scipio or Pompey.

An Analysis of The Manuscripts of A Passage to India

An analysis of the multiple versions of many of the novel's events contained in E. M. Forster's manuscript of A Passage to India increases our understanding of the published work. Examining his changes in the “Caves” and “Temple” material supports the notion that the novel is a philosophic one, whose themes were in Forster's mind from the beginning–largely as a result of his Indian experiences–but whose dramatic structure was developed slowly as he sought to create characters who would animate his ideas. Thus, the nihilistic message of the Marabar Caves–that “everything exists, nothing has value”–is substantially the same in even the earliest version, only there it is the schoolmaster Fielding, rather than Mrs. Moore, who encounters this bleak pronouncement. Since such a vision could never alter Fielding's admirable yet limited humanism in any significant respect, Forster decided to have Mrs. Moore enter the cave instead. In the published work, Mrs. Moore emerges in a dominant role as a disillusioned mystic after her earlier MS beginnings as a conventional, God-fearing Christian lady.