This is a workmanlike but in the end not entirely satisfying biography that somewhat ploddingly follows the course primarily of White's diaries and letters but without a thorough analysis of White as a writer. Perhaps I have been spoiled by my recent reading of Paula Blanchard's Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World And Her Work, but I would have hoped for more discussion of White's literary works and less of unending details of White's psychiatric and familial problems.

Shortly before her death in a nursing home, White was visited by her longtime (and one of her best) friends, Phyllis Jones; and Dunn writes (p. 430) that White "managed a few weak laughs with her old friend, her sense of humour still struggling to the surface." Unfortunately, while this biography does include a few other references to White's sense of humor, there are few real examples of it and no references to positively hilarious scenes in some of White's writings.

Anyone who grew up in pre-Vatican II Catholicism would recognize the hilarity in the scene, in Frost in May, in which an elderly and near-blind nun accidentally pierces a girl's earlobe with a safety pin while trying to adorn the girl for her First Communion. The hilarity is not in the rather macabre, accidental ear-piercing but in its aftermath, with a nun holding up this ear-pierced victim as a model of silent martyr-like fortitude! You have to read the scene – and read the novel as a whole – to catch this bizarre humor, and perhaps you need a personal background in pre-Vatican II Catholicism to appreciate it; and I'm wondering if Jane Dunn is lacking in this background.

One of my favorite stories – not just one of my favorite White stories, but one of my favorite stories PERIOD – is "The Exile," republished in White's Strangers anthology. It's a positively hilarious monologue by a nutcase who wants to be a nun but with whom the bishop will have nothing to do, whereupon she starts planning to cross the Channel and make a pilgrimage to Rome to appeal to the Pope. Although the story itself was first written in 1935, it calls to mind one of White's later acquaintances, Benedicta deBezer, whom White did not meet until the late 1940s. The story, however, was republished after White's making deBezer's acquaintance, and one has to wonder if White ever saw deBezer's religious mania as resembling that of "The Exile" narrator.

As someone who grew up in pre-Vatican II Catholicism (I'm now Presbyterian), I'm able to catch White's humor in a way that Jane Dunn might not.

Any admirer of White will want to read Dunn's biography, and it really is quite workmanlike, but it could have been a great deal more.

NOTE: One of White's close friends, Emily Holmes Coleman, appears frequently throughout this biography. Coleman will be familiar to Viragoites as author of Shutter of Snow. ( )