Emboldening the Weak: The Early Fiction of James Anthony Froude

Abstract

This chapter presents a case for a re-reading of James Anthony Froude’s early fictional writing. ¹ It questions the all too familiar assumption that they were simply the sentimental, autobiographical effusions of a damaged soul. And in the case of the most misunderstood—and least autobiographical—of his writings, The Nemesis of Faith (1849), it argues that Froude was engaged, both intellectually and emotionally, with the question of the moral implications of inescapable sexual desire, most especially as it impinged upon the actions (or inactions) of weak or damaged individuals. In this exploration, he sought to contrast the pure but rarefied injunctions to celibacy of Newman, as expounded in his novel Loss and Gain, with the far more worldly and more morally challenging address of Goethe in his novel Elective Affinities (a fiction which Froude himself was to be the first to translate into English). Froude was among the first of Goethe’s English readers to grasp the minatory character of Goethe’s difficult novel, but his efforts to render them comprehensible to his own generation seemed to be beyond his own creative abilities.