ABSTRACT
In his Introduction to Adelaide Procter’s collected works, Legends and Lyrics, Charles Dickens records that in the early hours of the morning on the 3rd February 1864 Adelaide Procter died after a long illness. Dickens says that by the time Adelaide ‘attained to womanhood’ she had read ‘an extraordinary number of books, and throughout her life she was always largely adding to the number’. Procter’s wide reading and facility with languages is evident in many of her narrative poems which are based on folk-tales collected from various countries. An admiration for women’s strength and beauty along with a fear of a precarious and ‘perilous’ life, which are expressed in the juvenilia, may have contributed to Procter’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. The iconic figure of the Virgin Mary and the power with which she was associated, combined with the apparent strength of Roman Catholic conviction, may well have appealed to Procter’s imagination.
