Linked Lives

Another Catholic triple-decker published by Hurst and Blackett.  Its author, Lady Gertrude Douglas (1842-93), was a not-overly-prolific novelist and philanthropist whose primary claim to fame, other than her conversion, was the minor scandal she caused in 1882 by marrying a former "street waif" twenty years or so her junior.  One of the numerous aristocratic converts of the period, Lady Gertrude also had a go at being a nun, which apparently did not end well (although no hard feelings, at least in public). Linked Lives, although it in part shares A Woman's Trials' French setting, is otherwise a far more explicitly religious novel: its primary subject is the psychodrama of conversion, manifested in deeply individual forms, and it contains a number of "controversial" exchanges laying out dogma (e.g., the Immaculate Conception).  Anglo-Catholics come off as particularly deluded members of a nation that has lost its spiritual way, in contrast to the deliberately anachronistic and faithful Brittany.    The novel's particular affective focus, though, is the Real Presence, which is the crucial sticking point for one of our protagonists.  

The primary "linked lives" of the title are Mabel Stanhope, a wealthy young Ritualist who feels dangerously attracted to Catholicism (and, of course, eventually converts); Hugh Fortescue, a much older relative by marriage, with whom she falls passionately in love and vice-versa, despite him being (gulp) a Low Churchman; and Katie Mackay, daughter of impoverished Irish immigrants to Scotland, who is taken up by a family of thieves and finds her life going even further downhill from there.  These lives are, in turn, linked to people both nice (the Vaughans, father and daughter, fellow Ritualists who precede Mabel into Catholicism; Steenie Logie, a sailor in love with Katie) and nasty (the thieving Kerr clan; Willie Cameron, who seduces and impregnates Katie).  The links that unite all these lives, of course, are provided by divine providence, which has a habit of speaking up.  Katie's life--theft, reformatory school, pregnancy, attempted suicide, jail--is more outwardly exciting than Mabel's, but Mabel's desperate wrestling with the knowledge that conversion will blow up her engagement to Hugh does more of the novel's emotional work.  Lady Gertrude structures each woman's life in terms of endless worldly deferrals on the way to union with God, ultimately redeeming Katie entirely and granting her marriage and family (albeit by relocating her to Australia, along with Steenie), despite her sexual "fall," while rewarding Mabel and the finally-converted Hugh with...near-simultaneous deaths, Mabel on an exploding ship (!) and Hugh from lung disease.  That, one notes, is the better ending of the two.

Such fatal endings to romance are a regular feature of Catholic fiction--Protestants are more likely to let people get married and such--but the reader's understandable exasperation with the outcome ("not again") is, in some respects, anticipated by and folded into the plot itself.  Life, Lady Gertrude argues in the third volume, constitutes an "exile country, where all are at best but pilgrims, journeying towards their home"; the "sacrifices" demanded of the converted faithful are necessary "to recover for our nation the treasure of faith, forfeited by our heretic ancestors," and thus should be borne willingly (III.58).  This argument renders explicit the literal and figurative homelessness of all of the novel's main characters, and grounds their physical and spiritual displacement in a larger drama of national transformation.  Thus, Katie begins the novel in a slum, is passed on to the Kerrs, is passed on again to the reformatory, is passed on once more to service, and so forth, until she concludes the novel rooted in domesticity abroad--at home, yet still in permanent exile from her native Scotland.  Mabel, who also spends a lot of time in motion, seeks to become a true "child" of the church, but cannot figure out what that church is.  Her death, significantly, comes on the journey between Scotland and Australia, so that she bypasses a lesser potential home (life in Australia with Hugh, should he survive) to be released from exile by entering Heaven.  Similarly, Hugh dies in Australia without ever being able to return to his homeland, or make a home with Mabel.  Steenie, Katie's devoted lover, is a sailor who is always in the process of moving between one part of the world to the next.  Even when characters find a spiritual home in the Catholic church, like Reverend, later Father, Vaughan, they die far away from their national home.  In other words, Lady Gertrude's characters are always alienated from domesticity (private or national), never quite able to rest in this-worldly space.  Significantly, only the nuns of the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration achieve anything close to being fully at home, and then only in the presence of the Sacrament: "Happiest of all thou," the narrator apostrophizes Mabel's friend Genevieve Vaughan, now a nun, "who hast chosen for thy portion to dwell in the shadow of the sanctuary, and to know no other love on earth than the love of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  In our poor outer world hearts are daily torn with loving.  There is no earthly love but has its bitter pangs.  Not to everyone is it given, as to thee, to begin on earth the life of heaven" (III.259).  It thus makes sense that Hugh and Mabel are rewarded by being denied carnal love.  Mabel, who loves Hugh with the "deepest heart-worship" (II.18) but without sexual consummation, and who in the presence of the Sacrament is filled with "a rush of indescribable love" (II.189), is almost, but not quite, like Genevieve.  They share the devotion to the Sacrament, but Mabel is riven by her simultaneous earthly desire for Hugh and her spiritual absorption in Christ; her fiery death on the journey to reunite with him, while horrifying, is also a metaphorical martyrdom (akin to burning at the stake), given that she gives up her place in the lifeboat to Katie.  Dying resolves the problem of loving Hugh and loving Christ, just as it resolves Hugh's similar dilemma.  (Modern readers will still probably not find this an upbeat conclusion.)

Of course, Mabel's death at sea has been prefigured from early on in the novel--"you would not believe how much I love, yet hate--dread the sea!"  says Mabel, which Hugh and Genevieve will "remember" many years later (I.162)--and this, too, is part of the novel's discipline.  For it is not just that Lady Gertrude likes to point out the workings of providence, but that she makes sure to spoil particularly exciting events, like the sudden death of Mabel's brother Guy in a boating accident (II.79).  There's a bit of having one's cake and eating it, in the sense that the novel both wants  to foreground sensational events (death by drowning, death by fire, attempted suicide and possible child-murder, etc.) and carefully prefigures them all so that the reader feels no shock. Maureen Moran has argued that sensationalism "challenges consensus about the supposedly stable and comprehensible social world" (9), but here, the Catholic novelist grounds the apparently sensational in the larger unfolding of God's plot, as explicated by the helpful narrator.   The characters experience the sudden and inexplicable horrors of everyday life, but the reader, by virtue of having advance knowledge, is denied the pleasure of shilling-shocker thrills.  That is, the reader is asked to contemplate horror, but is also asked to reflect on their desire for the sensation of horror--a desire that the novel resolutely denies, much as it denies Hugh and Mabel their romance.