Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Lesley Higgins, author of Confessing the Flesh: Reading Hopkins in Context

What inspired you to write this book? 

I first read Hopkins as a PhD student—and was dazzled by the poetry. That initial enthusiasm inspired my doctoral dissertation, and then a lot of fascinating archival research ... and eventually led to my work as co-editor of Hopkins’s Collected Works (for Oxford UP). Confessing the Flesh is the result of questions about Hopkins, Victorian religious controversies, and power relations that have been simmering for years (I spent five years transcribing, editing, and annotating Hopkins’s diaries and journals, which included his confessional notes). I wanted to find a way to discuss the personal, spiritual, and cultural implications of religious beliefs. As well, the need “to confess” is pervasive in our society, and I wanted to explore the history and implications of such practices and mindsets.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

Gerard Manley Hopkins was both “counter, original” and wholly predictable. An obsession with sinning, rituals of confession, and the flesh—the body as the site of sin and degradation—was one of the most common things about him. The book investigates how various facets of Victorian life and culture interacted, from religious beliefs and political machinations, new forms of knowledge clashing with entrenched principles, to scientific controversies and dramas of gender discrimination. “Confessing the flesh” defined the licit and illicit and informed an aesthetics that embraced the sensuous, the sensational, and the shameful. My aim was and is to expand our understanding of Hopkins’s cultural contexts.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

In terms of the research required: I knew that I had to learn about the history of confession in Christianity and Roman Catholicism in particular (Hopkins, who was raised in a devout Anglican family, converted to Catholicism when he was 22). I was surprised to learn that everything to do with confession—whether it was public or private, sacramental or occasional; whether it should be reinstated in the Church of England—was controversial in the nineteenth century. The sheer number and vehemence of the pamphlets, books, sermons, letters to newspapers, Punch cartoons, and denunciations in Parliament produced is amazing. So the structure of the book had to be shifted accordingly.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

It is not exactly an anecdote-informed project. But there was the example of St. Augustine confessing, “Lord, make me holy—but not yet.” More seriously, it was fascinating to compare the ways in which Hopkins was taught to loathe and fear “the flesh” with the ways in which some of his contemporaries—Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne—embraced its aesthetic and sexual possibilities.

What’s next? 

The final volume in the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Poetry, will be published this year. So that’s hugely exciting. Hopkins is one of five authors (along with Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes) I will be considering in a new project that focuses on repetition.