Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Caroline Gordon's Catholicism, as presented in her two latest novels, The Strange Children (1951), and The Malefactors (1956), is of a rather special kind, one that advocates the practice of the highest theological virtue, charity or Christian love. Eschewing pride, which negates the kind of understanding and sympathy deficient in the characters of her earlier novels, her Catholics seek selfless...