Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

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Her skill as a novelist shows us John Donne the man, so real, so eccentric, fizzing with talent, weird as hell; while her attention to detail makes her a historian of the first rank. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral – and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Rundell, at one point, says: “The human soul is so ruthlessly original; the only way to express the distinctive pitch of one’s own heart is for each of us to build our own way of using our voice. The way Rundell brings Donne and Donne’s poetics to life is a joy, shot through with deep readings, compassion, perspective, wit.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne review

Though [Donne’s] own learning and other multiplied merits may justly appear sufficient to dignify both himself and his posterity; yet the reader may be pleased to know, that his father was masculinely and lineally descended from a very ancient family in Wales, where many of his name now live, that deserve, and have great reputation in that country. He should, really, have been a scholar with a quiet, paper-bound life, chewing on swan-feather quills (Elizabeth’s preferred writing pen: popular at court) and disputing the finer points of religious heresy.The names and lives of his siblings, for instance, are blurry; there were at least two before him, Elizabeth and Anne, then John, and after him Henry and then we aren’t so sure.

Katherine Rundell - Wikipedia Katherine Rundell - Wikipedia

As this new biography comments, his restless hungers and desires made Donne “incapable of being just one thing. In a different sermon, he wrote of how we would one day be with God in ‘an infinite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable space, millions of millions of unimaginable spaces in heaven’. But he had to leave Oxford, unable to negotiate the ever more stringent reforms against Catholics, and became a Jesuit priest. There was a great concourse of noblemen and gentlemen’, and in among ‘the extreme press and thronging’, as they pushed closer to hear his words, men in the crowd were shoved to the ground and trampled. John Carey, in his landmark 1981 Life, Mind and Art , was fascinated by Donne’s conviction that, as he wrote in a sermon, “all that the soul does, it does in, and with, and by the body”.Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she works on Renaissance literature. That morning he was not preaching in his own church, but fifteen minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, where a new chapel was being consecrated.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of

And, once settled: ‘Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office; my neck is very short; take heed therefore thou strike not awry. He was often hopeless, often despairing, and yet still he insisted at the very end: it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.

We meet all his closely-entangled selves - wit, poet, lover, husband, soldier, priest – and all of them are cleverly drawn, creating a portrait in which closely-observed details are ingeniously set against a background of long perspectives. Rundell's first book, published in 2011, was The Girl Savage; it told the story of Wilhelmina Silver, a girl from Zimbabwe, who is sent to an English boarding-school following the death of her father. Early on, she describes the 23-year-old Donne sitting for a portrait in the late 16th century, and notes “the painting was of a man who knew about fashion; he wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in, a big lace collar, an exquisite moustache”.