Cover Art and Design by Gary Karl Nauman
Borderlands: The Art and Scholarship of Louise Imogen Guiney, published by The Vaughan Association, is the first edited collection of original essays ever published on Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), Irish American poet, essayist, editor, literary critic, and epistolist, and the first volume to anthologise a selection of both her poetry and prose. During her life in Boston and Britain, Guiney composed seventeen volumes of poetry and prose, contributed to many periodicals, edited and translated literary and religious texts, and wrote thousands of letters, many to and about central fin-de-siècle literary figures. She was an intimate of Sarah Orne Jewett and a protégé of Annie Adams Fields. Willa Cather praised her work as exemplary of the best American poetry of the time. She was also associated with the counter-cultural aesthetic movement in turn-of-the century Boston and, while in Oxford, was active in its vibrant Roman Catholic subculture.
"This is a timely and welcome centenary volume. It combines essays on the fascinating Louise Imogen Guiney … with a helpful and judicious selection of her own writings in prose and verse."
~ Helen Wilcox, Ph.D., Bangor University
"An excellent and very readable introduction to the life and work of an understudied but important literary voice. By recovering Guiney’s writing for contemporary readers, this volume offers insight into the fascinating transitional era between the Victorian and Modernist worlds."
~ Laura N. Van Dyke, Ph.D., Trinity Western University
“As a
poet, essayist, and epistolist, Guiney was hailed a shooting star of rare
brilliance in her own generation. However, her scholarship and
editing of Henry Vaughan and other seventeenth-century poets may well
be her most enduring legacy. It is only fitting that this centenary collection
of essays would rehabilitate a transatlantic woman of
letters who recovered and restored the works and reputations of
literary figures who had also unjustly faded from view.”
~Damon DiMauro, Gordon College
EDITORS
Jonathan Nauman, Ph.D. has taught at colleges in Pennsylvania and New England and has published widely on George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Gwenllian Morgan.
Holly Faith Nelson, Ph.D., Professor of English and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University, has published on the lives and works of women from the late medieval period to the present.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
By Jonathan Nauman
ESSAYS ON THE LIFE AND WORKS OF LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
Louise Imogen
Guiney: Biographical Perspectives
By Patricia J. Fanning
Louise Imogen
Guiney: A Transatlantic Life
By Libby MacDonald Bischof
Discordia
Concors: The Poetry of Louise Imogen Guiney
By Holly Faith Nelson and
Katharine Bubel
Breaching “Worn
Conventions”: Guiney’s Patrins and the Patrilineal Essay Tradition
By Bridget M. Chapman
Louise Imogen
Guiney and the Stuart Past
By Alex Murray
Louise Imogen
Guiney and Late Romanticism: Fairies, Faith, and Scientific Fact in Brownies
and Bogles
By Holly Faith Nelson
Louise Imogen
Guiney and Editing the Poetry of Henry Vaughan
By Robert Wilcher
Humanism and
Romanticism in the Usk Valley: Paul Elmer More, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Henry
Vaughan
By Jonathan Nauman
SELECTIONS FROM THE POETRY, ESSAYS, AND LETTERS OF LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
Poems
§ Open, Time
§ Horologion
§ A Friend’s Song
for Simoisius
§ Two Irish
Peasant Songs
§ Arboricide
§ The Wild Ride
§ A Song of the
Lilac
§ Monochrome
§ A Talisman
§ A Footnote to
a Famous Lyric
§ Summum Bonum
§ Writ in My
Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion
§ An Outdoor
Litany
§ In a Brecon
Valley
§ Emily Brontë
§ Borderlands
§ On First
Entering Westminster Abbey
§ Fog
§ In the
Reading-Room of the British Museum
§ Sunday Chimes
in the City
§ A Jacobite Revival
Essays
§ The Passing of
the Little People
§ On the Rabid versus the
Harmless Scholar
§ Wilful Sadness
in Literature
§ The White King
§ Lovelace and
Vaughan: A Speculation
§ Milton and Vaughan
Letters
§ To Fred
Holland Day, 16 October 1894
§ To the Rev.
W.H. van Allen, 9-12 September 1896
§ To Miss Mary
A. Jordan, 11 December 1907
§ To Elkin
Mathews, 19 April 1913
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Libby MacDonald Bischof (Ph.D. Boston
College) is Professor of History and Executive Director of the Osher Map
Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of
Southern Maine. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century American history and
visual culture. Her articles have appeared in such journals as The
History Teacher, Nineteenth Century, The Journal of the
Victorian Society in America and in the academic collections Transatlantic
Women: Nineteenth Century American Women Writers in Great Britain and Europe (University
Press of New England, 2012) and Two Centuries of Faith (Crossroads,
2009). Recent books include her co-authored volumes Maine Moderns: Art
in Seguinland, 1900-1940 (Yale University Press 2011) and Maine
Photography: A History, 1840-2015 (Down East Books, 2016). She
resides in Gorham, Maine, with her husband, son, and daughter.
Katharine Bubel (Ph.D. University of Victoria) is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, Canada. She has published on American and British literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a series of journals and scholarly collections, exploring, for example, nature, spirituality, and/or desire in the poetry or prose of Charlotte Brontë, George MacDonald, Gerard Manley Hopkins, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Theodore Roethke. She is currently completing a book manuscript “Edge Effects: Poetry, Place and Spiritual Practice,” on the works of five twentieth- and twenty-first century North American West Coast poets.
Bridget M.Chapman (Ph.D. Temple University) is the executive director of the School of General Studies at Kean University in New Jersey. Her research specialty is Irish American Fiction, with a focus on issues of race, ethnicity, and identity.
Patricia J. Fanning (Ph.D. Boston College) is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Bridgewater State University. She specializes in the art and culture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century New England. Her book, Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2008, which also published her works Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918 (2010) and Artful Lives: The Francis Watts Lee Family and Their Times (2016).
Alex
Murray (Ph.D. University of Melbourne) is Senior
Lecturer at the School of Arts, English, and Languages at Queen’s University
Belfast. He has published widely on British literature of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, with a specialty in Decadent literature. His
most recent books include the monograph Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de
Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2016), the edited
collection Decadence: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and the co-edited
collection Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Johns Hopkins University Press,
2019). His next monograph, Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Holly Faith Nelson (Ph.D. Simon
Fraser University) is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Gender
Studies Institute at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, Canada. Her
work on women’s writing, gender and literature, and religion and literature (on
texts and concepts from the medieval to the modern age) have appeared in a wide
range of journals and essay collections over the past two decades. Her
co-authored monograph, Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature,
1642-1722, was recently published by McGill-Queen’s University Press
(2021).
Jonathan Nauman (Ph.D. Duke University) has taught at colleges in Pennsylvania and New England. He has published widely on George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Gwenllian Morgan in such journals as Seventeenth-Century News, The George Herbert Journal, Brycheiniog, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, Scintilla: A Journal of Literary Criticism, Prose and New Poetry in the Metaphysical Tradition, and in the recent collection Henry Vaughan and the Usk Valley (Logaston Press, 2016).
Robert Wilcher (Ph.D. University
of Birmingham) retired as a Reader in Early Modern Studies in the Department of
English at the University of Birmingham. His publications include Andrew
Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Understanding
Arnold Wesker (University of South Carolina Press, 1991), The
Writing of Royalism 1628-1660 (Cambridge University Press,
2001), The Discontented Cavalier (University of Delaware
Press, 2007), and Keeping the Ancient Way: Aspects of the Life and Work
of Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) (Liverpool University Press, 2021). He
has recently co-edited two book collections: Henry Vaughan and the Usk
Valley (Logaston Press, 2016) and the Works of Henry Vaughan (Oxford
University Press, 2019).
