Sylvia Legge, Affectionate Cousins: T. Sturge Moore and Marie Appia

Abstract

Sylvia Legge, a friend since childhood of the Sturge Moore family, has written an absorbing story of three interrelated religious families — the Baptist Moores and the Quaker Sturges in England, and the Vaudois Appias in France. The story is framed by the relations of “affectionate cousins” in these family lines, beginning with the marriage of Henry and Lydia Sturge in 1838 and ending with the marriage of Thomas Sturge Moore and Marie Appia in 1903. The author straightforwardly allows that the study is “not the scholarly biography of Thomas Sturge Moore and critical assessment of his work that should be written,” but the book is none the less scholarly in method and provides literary historians with needed information about Sturge Moore’s London circle. Yeats found this group quite useful for his early dramatic schemes in London. Much of the literary biography, however, is sacrificed to the delineation of family relationships, particularly to Sturge Moore’s protracted, tortured, yet poetic correspondence with his French cousin over the possibility and difficulty of reciprocal love. The major frustration, however, is that the story ends just as Sturge Moore begins to emerge as a significant literary figure. Aware of its immediate interests and ultimate limitations, the tantalizing narrative underscores the need for a full-scale critical biography and for a serious reappraisal of Sturge Moore’s poetry and verse drama.