Life And Letters Of J H Shorthouse Edited By His Wife Sarah Shorthouse With An Introduction By John Hunter Smith

Excerpt from Life and Letters of J. H. Shorthouse: Edited by His Wife N ow, I think we may regard our late distinguished fellow-townsman as the chief lay and literary exponent in our days of cultured Anglicanism. Let us use the words of Professor Dowden to aid us in seeing what that implies. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

When J. Henry Shorthouse (1834-1903) published John Inglesant in 1881, he contributed a unique synthesis of Anglo-Catholic sensibilities to the enduring legacy of the Oxford Movement. Although his "philosophical romance" has been acclaimed "the greatest Anglo-Catholic novel in English literature" and "the one English novel that speaks immediately to human intuition without regard to the reader's own faith or philosophy", his most enduring contributions are the "religion of John Inglesant", an Anglo-Catholic synthesis of obedience and freedom, faith and reason, and the sacramental vision of "the myth of Little Gidding". Afflicted with a lifelong stammer, "the author of John Inglesant" proved himself a master of cadenced rhythms and "enspiritualised" prose in quest of "the great musical novel". Delineating parallels between sixteenth-century and Victorian England, Shorthouse integrated Quietism with Platonism into a religious aesthetic, a sacramental vision of "the Divine Principle of the Platonic Christ". Studied chronologically, Shorthouse's transition from Quaker to "Broad Church Sacramentalist" provides informing comparison with T. S. Eliot's conversion from Unitarian to Anglo-Catholic, as his myth of Little Gidding informs the historical imagination of Eliot's Christian poetry and dramas. The religious and developmental nature of the work of both artists affords analogies with C. G. Jung's psychology of Individuation.