Four Independents: Charles P�guy, Paul Claudel, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Orestes Augustus Brownson

New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935 . First edition. Small octavo, original yellow cloth, original dust jacket. Minor soiling to yellow cloth and top of textblock, trace of foxing to the fore-edge, dust jacket spine toned with creasing to the ends, modest soiling on both panels. Rare complete with original dust jacket. Very good indeed.

FOUR SINGULAR CATHOLIC LIVES. First edition of this quartet of essays on the spiritual journeys four singular Catholic figures, now scarce in the original dust jacket.

Daniel Sargent's follow-up to his well-regarded biography of Thomas More (1934) illuminates the lives of two Frenchmen, an Englishman, and an American. Charles P�guy and Paul Claudel represented different aspects of the French Catholic tradition: P�guy returned to the solidarity of Catholic Social Teaching by way of Socialism while Paul Claudel blended the devout Catholicism and conservative Royalism (which included a dose of anti-Semitism) typical of Old France. Gerard Manley Hopkins was an Anglican convert to a Roman Catholicism that, along with the Society of Jesus, was alien to his fellow Englishmen. Virtually unknown in his lifetime, Hopkins is now regarded as one of the great poets of the Victorian Age. Sargent was a New Englander and he closes with a look at Orestes Augustus Brownson, a fellow Yankee. Brownson converted to Catholicism in 1844, a Conservative protest against the capitalist industrialism of the age. These disparate figures of varied sensibilities are united by their independence, by the spirituality of the lives they led on the margins of the faith, the peripheries of the Church.