White, Helen Constance

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WHITE, Helen Constance

Born 26 November 1896, New Haven, Connecticut; died 7 June 1967, Madison, Wisconsin

Daughter of John and Mary King White

In 1901 Helen Constance White's family moved to Boston, where she attended Girl's High School and Radcliffe College, receiving her M.A. in 1917. After teaching for two years at Smith, she moved west to the University of Wisconsin, where, except for study tours and research leaves, she remained until her death, living in the same apartment for over 40 years. She received her Ph.D. in English in 1924, and in 1936 was the first woman to become a full professor in Letters and Science at the university. She later served as chairman of the English department.

According to White, "Belonging to things is an occupational disease of the profession!" One year she was simultaneously president of the local University Club, president of the University of Wisconsin Teachers Union, and national president of the American Association of University Women. As the first woman national president of the American Association of University Professors, she took a firm stand for academic freedom. Twice she served as a U.S. delegate to UNESCO meetings.

White's scholarly works usually combine her competence in literature with her lifelong interest in religion. The Mysticism of William Blake (1927) and The Metaphysical Poets (1936) are critical studies of major literary figures. Other studies, such as Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (1963), analyze materials of greater religious and historical import than literary significance.

Such scholarly work served as impetus and background for the writing of novels centering on figures from Catholic history. Her fiction probed the minds and souls of sensitive men and women gallantly attempting to live out their ideals in a blemished church and world. In Dust on the King's Highway (1947), the competing goals of the pioneering Franciscan friars in California and the secular Spanish administration result in massacre and martyrdom. In Not Built with Hands (1935), the strong Countess Matilda, "Lord of Tuscany," loyally keeps her resources in the service of the vulnerable Pope Gregory VII. To the End of the World (1939) focuses on a young priest who, though he supports the ideas of the French Revolution, refuses to accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and goes underground. Each of the protagonists must in the end face partial defeat.

Critics suggested that editorial pruning would have improved the narrative line of White's fiction. In none of her novels is there a developed love story. Her readers often find her careful spiritual appraisals and rich descriptions slow and gentle in pace, but her concern for the spiritual is at once the strength and the weakness of her fiction. She confessed to a passion for history and steeped herself in the lore and traditions of monasticism and mysticism. She filled a broad canvas with lavish historical detail against which opposing forces of order and chaos, freedom and bondage, persuasion and violence, played themselves out. Her sympathetic delineation of the delicate conscience and missionary zeal is unsurpassed in spiritual insight.

Other Works:

Victorian Prose (with F. Foster, 1930). English Devotional Literature (Prose) 1600-1640 (1931). A Watch in the Night (1933). Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (1944). Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (with R. Wallerstein and R. Quintana, 1951). The Tudor Books of Private Devotion (1951). The Four Rivers of Paradise (1955). Bird of Fire (1958). Prayer and Poetry (1960). Changing Styles in Literary Studies (1963).