With his incongruous dedication “To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th. 1875,” Gerard Manley Hopkins launched a groundbreaking poetry career that would not be acclaimed until after his own premature death in 1889. In Exiles (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23), these six out-of-season deaths are reimagined and interwoven by novelist Ron Hansen.
Hansen, a Stegner fellow in 1977-78 and the author of Mariette in Ecstasy, holds a professorship named for Hopkins at Santa Clara University. His book takes off from Hopkins’s famous poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” about a North Sea liner that ran aground at the mouth of the Thames, killing 157 passengers and crew. Hopkins, the son of a marine insurer, was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales who had halted an Oxford-bred poetry career because it seemed incompatible with a selfless priesthood. But then the shipwreck inspired this elegy—as, in its innovative sprung-rhythm verses, Hopkins strove to reconcile worldly tragedy with his Catholic faith.
Accruing particle-fine details to mold plausible biographies of the five German nuns, Hansen describes how they blossomed from spare childhoods into religious vocations. They were about to be transplanted to St. Louis, Mo., because a move to secularize Germany was shrinking religious orders. Hansen juxtaposes their exile with Hopkins’s own: after the brilliant but eccentric scholar failed a crucial theology exam, he could not advance as might have been expected in the Society of Jesus. He wound up in an ill-fitting teaching job in Ireland, where, sickened by typhoid and depression, he died at 44.
