It is difficult to be fair to Miss Ruggles’ centennial life of Hopkins.1 By conventional literary and commercial standards, it is not only “needed” but adequate and creditable. It supplies a book-length, “decidedly readable” biography of a poet by now famous enough to deserve all the rights and emoluments. Neither Fr. Lahey, the official Jesuit memoirist, nor John Pick, author of a recent sensible Hopkins handbook, is a real competitor. Certainly, too, Miss Ruggles has, according to her lights, labored conscientiously. The basis of her biography is to be found in the three volumes of Hopkins’ letters and the Notebooks, which includes the extant sermons and the commentary on the Ignatian Exercises. Her central routine is the chronological quotation and annotation of passages from the letters. But she has also looked up the books written by Hopkins’ rather special father and reconstructed Hopkins’ novitiate at Roehampton from the accounts of two contemporaries of his. Then she has worked up biographical sketches of all Hopkins’ friends, teachers, acquaintances. The entrance of a new character occasions a crisp, sprightly, usually visualizing characterization. To introduce Dr. Pusey:
Strands of graying hair issued from his black skull cap, white sideburns fringed his gaunt cheeks, and the forward set of his massive head gave him the aspect of one perpetually lost in thought. There was not a lonelier man in England.
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