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 Darcy—which contains not only her six novels but her unpublished writings from both before and after she became famous.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’horizon not 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.”
We all know the cliché that life is about the journey and not the destination, but what Harrigan proves beautifully in Sorrowful Mysteries, as he stood near the slope where the three shepherd children once prayed, is that the destination matters. This book is its own wonder.
Can the biography of a Roman poet who lived more than 2,000 years ago and whose work he felt never achieved the acclaim it deserved be vibrant and enthralling? Yes, if Peter Stothard is the author, and in his account of the life and poetry of Quintus Horatius Flaccus he reminds us why both the man and his work remain relevant today. Horace, as he is commonly known, put much of his own life into his poems, but he was not always a reliable source, and Stothard deftly constructs a compelling portrait of a man and his times that will entrance even those—make that especially those—who do not know Horace minted the phrase “carpe diem.”
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl. He can be reached at jkelly@airmail.news
