How Catholic women left their mark on our nation
Francis Phillips is enthralled by these bold and inspiring portraits of heroic women

11 December 2009
Caroline Chisholm: Though married with a young family she responded to a pressing social need

English Catholic Heroines
edited by Joanna Bogle
Gracewing, £9.99

This book is the companion volume to English Catholic Heroes edited by John Jolliffe and published last year. It is particularly welcome in the present climate when women in general seem to have forgotten the “feminine genius” so beautifully articulated by John Paul II, and when some women are in confusion and anger over the Catholic Church’s response to the question of women’s ordination. Only recently I listened to a radio programme on my car radio that talked yet again about how tolerant the Church of England is towards the many strange bedfellows that slumber under its benign coverlet – including those women now wanting to be bishops.

As Joanna Bogle indicates in her introduction to this wonderfully heterogeneous group of women, they all found fulfilment as women in the Church without seeking a distinct hierarchical role. Their number spans many centuries, beginning with the early medieval period, through the Reformation and the long period following it before the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850, down to the present day.

Some, like St Margaret of Scotland (born a Saxon), are well known; others, like Elizabeth Cellier, 17th-century convert and midwife, or Frances Wootten, widow, friend of Cardinal Newman and matron at the Oratory School he founded, are here given due recognition.

Sister Andrea of the Sisters of the Gospel of Life writes of St Margaret that “she used what she had been given to enrich the lives of others”. This could be said of all the vivid and attractive personalities found in these pages.

Dr Tracey Rowland, who contributes the chapter on Lady Margaret Beaufort, friend of St John Fisher and grandmother of Henry VIII, wittily sums up the opportunities available in describing her subject as coming from “a long litany of aristocratic Catholic women... who found themselves married off to some pagan warlord whom they managed to civilise through a mixture of tenderness, heroic patience and shrewd strategic planning”. Omitting the word “aristocratic” – has anything changed?

Lucy Underwood deftly summarises the complicated political history surrounding the tragic figure of Blessed Margaret Pole, concluding that “opinions still differ as to whether she was killed for her lineage, her faith, her son or her politics”. An even more tragic figure is Mary Tudor, rightly included here, whose unhappy reputation is rescued by Fr Antony Conlon.

Mac Mclernon, who writes about the Elizabethan martyr, St Anne Line, admits that at first she thought her subject, along with saints Margaret Clitherow and Margaret Ward, were “pretty insipid characters”. She discovered that there is nothing insipid about freely submitting to brutal judicial execution.

Maria Fitzherbert, clandestinely married to the Prince of Wales, later George IV, might seem an odd inclusion. However, Fr Mark Elvins makes out a good case for this “heroic and kind-hearted” woman, who behaved with dignity, restraint and discretion in an age of profligacy and excess. The Victorian period includes a group of stout-hearted nuns: Mary Clare Moore RSM, Elizabeth Prout CP, Elizabeth Hayes MFIC and Margaret Hallahan OP. The last-named has the distinction of being included in (agnostic) William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience as someone whose passion and goodness “irradiate around them”.

Lay women of faith and passion also emerge in the later period: Caroline Chisholm, “the emigrants’ friend”, who, though married with a young family, saw a pressing social need and used all her skills of “multi-tasking” in response to it.

Another childless woman, in this case the 20th-century mystic, visionary and artist Caryll Houselander, found her own kind of spiritual motherhood in caring for the lost and neurotic souls who came her way in the inter-war period.

Léonie Caldecott, who introduced me years ago to this “divine eccentric”, shows that being a Catholic heroine can include some very human qualities: “For most of her life Caryll smoked like a chimney; she was apt to swear and she liked a drink.”

A further unusual inclusion is Joanna Bogle’s own chapter on Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer, convert and supreme exponent of the peculiarly English genre of schoolgirl stories. Women of a certain generation – it now seems a long-lost age of innocence – had their imaginations shaped by this lively, engaging and wholesome world in which meanness was condemned and honesty, moral courage and high spirits were applauded.

As Joanna writes, Brent-Dyer’s series of stories exude moral certainty and “she gave ordinary girls role models” who were resourceful, cheerful and public-spirited. This, one recalls, was the generation of the Home Front in the last war.

An imaginative choice is that of Helen Asquith, daughter of Raymond who died in the Great War when she was only nine. Written by Emily Keyte, it is an affectionate record of an unusual friendship between a young woman in her 20s (Keyte) and the older woman, then in her mid-80s.

The unmarried Asquith, a convert like her widowed mother, Katharine, was an inspiring Classics teacher with a gift for friendship, among other things; she provides a radiant example of a life which was rich and fulfilled, although circumscribed by early tragedy.

Of course such a book is selective; readers will think of names that would have merited inclusion. Yet its compilation remains a stimulating and very worthwhile exercise.