This December marks the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, and celebrations are planned in the city of Bath and beyond. What better way to get a head start than by acquiring this eight-volume boxed set—as handsome as Mr. Darcy—which contains not only her six novels but her unpublished writings from both before and after she became famous. The books themselves are a pleasure to hold, with helpful annotations by noted Austen scholar Janet Todd, who has just published Living with Jane Austen, her glorious account of what studying Austen for more than 50 years has taught her. It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are two kinds of Austen fans: those who have read her and those who are about to be once they do read her.
The author is not the first person who, raised as a child in the Catholic Church in the early 1960s, became fascinated by the story of the three shepherd children who witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary near the Portuguese town of Fatima in 1917. It was an oft-told tale in catechism class, and especially memorable because one of the children years later wrote the Fatima Letter, which contained the prophecies uttered by Mary and ended up, sealed, in the hands of the Pope. When its contents were finally revealed in 2000, it was the stuff, in Stephen Harrigan’s words, of “fever-dream imagery-flaming swords, holy martyrs, a ruined city … ” Nonetheless, what this sets off in Harrigan is nothing less than memorable and astonishing, a tour d’horizonnot just of the Fatima spectacle and subsequent events in the last hundred years but of his own life and his search to connect with “an innermost Catholic self that can be neither thoroughly expelled nor honestly embraced.”
