Back to my usual Protestant hunting grounds. At the Gates of the Morning, initially serialized in the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine in 1898, takes place in both Kent and London between 1538 and 1555; there are quick guest appearances from Sir Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Cranmer, and Mary I, and a more developed role for William Roper. The novelist, Dora M. Jones, was not hugely prolific, but did write some fiction, periodical articles (she was interested in women's issues), and religious works. Not surprisingly, the publisher, Charles H. Kelly, also had Methodist connections.
Plot construction was not, perhaps, Ms. Jones' strong suit. However, it's possible to discern what we might call a redemption mega-arc atop several redemption mini-arcs. It takes a while for the novel's moral focus to emerge, but it eventually settles on wealthy and cultivated Edmund Rich (fictional, but possibly named after St. Edmund Rich), who hides a deep, dark secret: although converted to something bearing a resemblance to Protestantism while at the university, he betrayed (well, actually, he didn't, but everyone thinks he did) his friends to a manipulative priest named Nicholas Denner. Rich is still under Denner's thumb at the novel's beginning, even allowing his daughter, Katherine, to be requisitioned for Denner's nefarious plotting against the lovely young Lutheran, Lady Constance de Lisle, and, through her, Katherine Parr. Nevertheless, Rich eventually finds a backbone, not to mention his Bible, and winds up martyred during Mary's reign. His martyrdom redeems his earlier moral failure and testifies to the true strength of Protestantism. In the redemption mini-arcs, meanwhile, handsome Francis, Lord Radford, a former chorister converted to the "worship of beauty" (19)--probably an allusion to the fin-de-siecle aesthetes--must renounce the persecuted Lady Constance (who is Destined to Die at an Early Age) and learn that mercy reaps handsome dividends in the end; Katherine, who betrays Constance to Denner out of jealousy, must learn to value God over "selfish triumph" (98); and the mostly incidental Rupert, William Roper's nephew, must learn humility.
The novel's theological positions (including its Arminian tenets) may strike the modern reader as milder than those of many similar evangelical fictions. A Calvinist novelist would not have presented the following meditation by Edmund Rich without hedging it around with qualifiers: "He had made the great refusal, and he knew it. Even now in dreams he found himself agonising in the nightmare of a vain pursuit, while the gracious figure in the gray robe of toil passed him with averted head, left him in a desolation beyond all words; and he woke to the barren bitterness of a life from which hope and aspiration had departed" (63). In this novel, grace is very much resistible, and, having fallen away from it, Rich must now journey back. Jones refrains from dwelling on total depravity, however, and none of the characters undergo dramatic conversion experiences. (If anything, they're more "Darn, but I'm a jerk" experiences.) Moreover, despite the novel's overt anti-Catholicism, the Catholic characters are treated with some sympathy--although the sympathy manifests itself in cliched terms. William Roper, Edmund Rich's old friend, does not protest his martyrdom, but still protects Rich's daughter Katherine. Mary I is tragic instead of bloody-minded, a woman who suffers through a "disastrous and pitiful life" (250). And Nicholas Denner, who at first appears to be a stereotypical Plotting Catholic Priest, genuinely feels for both Edmund and Katherine, attempts to save the former from arrest, and eventually helps Katherine and Radford escape the country. (The last act is the payoff for Radford's own act of mercy--he had let Denner go instead of sending him to certain death.)
Unfortunately, the novel suffers from what appears to be inept planning during the serialization process. Characters like Clayton, a "hot gospeller," seem at first to be major protagonists, but then dwindle away into nothingness. There's a bizarre subplot about the bones of Thomas Becket, inspired (as a footnote near the end finally explains) by the discovery of a mysterious skeleton in 1888; Jones only sporadically remembers that this subplot even exists. And then there's the equally bizarre fate of Lady Constance de Lisle, Lord Radford's Doomed First Love. Allow me to open a window onto the thoughts of an apparently quiet scholar, sitting peacefully in a rare books room:
1. Lady Constance de Lisle is arrested. ("That's probably bad.")
2. Nicholas Denner subjects Lady Constance to Psychological Torments, then locks her in a high tower overlooking a stony beach. ("Poor Lady Constance! She's certainly doomed to martyrdom.")
3. Lady Constance disappears from the aforementioned high tower overlooking a stony beach. ("What is this, a locked room mystery?")
4. The condition of the ivy suggests that somebody climbed up to rescue Lady Constance. Either that, or she climbed down. ("Don't tell me--it's titanium-reinforced ivy.")
5. Alas, neither--Lady Constance fell onto the stony beach. ("Ouch.")
6. Another character happens along, finds Lady Constance lying in pain on the stony beach, and totes her off to the nearest household of Lutheran sympathizers. ("The woman fell a considerable distance onto a stony beach, and you picked her up?!" **mental headdesk**)
7. Hooray! Lady Constance really isn't hurt very badly. ("OK, so the woman has a titanium-reinforced body.")
8. A few weeks later, Lady Constance dies. Of what, it is not altogether clear. ("I think this is called 'death by plot necessity.'")
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