Books, Arts & Manners: Witness to Truth

A Need to Testify, by Iris Origo (Harcourt Brace, 288 pp., $14.95)

“My personal complaint about [Strachey’s] Eminent Victorians,” writes the distinguished Anglo-Italian biographer Iris Origo, “would not be that it is inaccurate, but that it is thin, and that the thinness springs from condescension. If you wish to see a person, you must not start by seeing through him.” In a series of remarkable biographies over the last fifty years, the Marchesa Origo has, by following her own advice, succeeded in sympathetically bringing to life a number of disparate individuals, including the poet Leopardi; the fourteenthcentury Italian Merchant of Prato; one of Byron’s mistresses and his illegitimate daughter, Allegra; the Carlyles; Mazzini; and, very memorably, both the person and The World of San Bernardino, in the course of which latter work she unintentionally gives a good brief description of the workings of her own moral and literary imagination: “It was this inner, costly participation—compassion in its original sense—which was never lacking in San Bernardino.”

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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A Need to Testify, by Iris Origo (Harcourt Brace, 288 pp., $14.95)

“My personal complaint about [Strachey’s] Eminent Victorians,” writes the distinguished Anglo-Italian biographer Iris Origo, “would not be that it is inaccurate, but that it is thin, and that the thinness springs from condescension. If you wish to see a person, you must not start by seeing through him.” In a series of remarkable biographies over the last fifty years, the Marchesa Origo has, by following her own advice, succeeded in sympathetically bringing to life a number of disparate individuals, including the poet Leopardi; the fourteenthcentury Italian Merchant of Prato; one of Byron’s mistresses and his illegitimate daughter, Allegra; the Carlyles; Mazzini; and, very memorably, both the person and The World of San Bernardino, in the course of which latter work she unintentionally gives a good brief description of the workings of her own moral and literary imagination: “It was this inner, costly participation—compassion in its original sense—which was never lacking in San Bernardino.”

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).