Sublime

her quiet creed: “Our faith might cause our light to shine on some other heart which as yet had no light of its own.”

Grace Macaulay – in whose veins ran Essex rivers and Bible ink; in whose philosophy the devils of hell and the saints of Bethesda did battle with her reason and her nature – sat with her phone on the bare floor of a Hackney room and thought of Thomas Hart. Come home, he’d written, you wretched child, and I am wretched, she thought, and I think I’d

She was born a Quaker. As such, she found herself in a vastly different social milieu than other American girls—a world with at least a window open to other possibilities. Her family believed in absolute equality of the sexes.

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

Mrs Cadwallader said, privately, ‘You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care o

she “lives at a rate and intensity and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy.”