![]() ![]() It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. Then there were years as the impoverished, frustrated father of 12 children (six died), a period of grief after his wife’s early death and his final efflorescence, at once unexpected and inevitable, as a clergyman who was swiftly promoted to dean of St Paul’s. Donne moved between success and penury, with a stint in law, an unsuccessful foray as an adventurer in Spain, and a period at court that ended when he secretly married Anne More and was thrown in prison by her father. Donne was born into a Catholic family at a time of persecution family members were imprisoned and tortured. In addition to Carey’s study, there’s a recent comprehensive biography by John Stubbs. The facts of Donne’s life are well known. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.” “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes. ![]() She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. Rundell is right that Donne – “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. ![]()
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