ABSTRACT
Adelaide Procter converted to Roman Catholicism probably in 1851 at the age of 25, six years after the conversion of the Tractarian theorist John Henry Newman in 1845. Strong devotional feeling runs through Procter’s poetry and she is a poet who works very much within the ethos of Tractarian poetics and aesthetics. The retreat is to a place where devotional duties are religiously observed and where harmony prevails over disorder. Such a place is the terrain of The Christian Year which was written, according to John Keble in the ‘Advertisement’, to help his reader bring his ‘thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with those recommended and exemplified in the Prayer Book’. Ingeborg, a young woman in her early twenties and the daughter of an overprotective and disciplinarian bishop, has responded impulsively to an advertisement for a trip to the Lucerne.
