SOURCE: “Originality and Realism in Newman's Novels,” in Newman after a Hundred Years, Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 21-42.

In the following essay, Hill comments on the artistic aims and successes of Newman's Loss and Gain and Callista.

‘Newman a novelist?’ One can imagine the chorus of disbelief that at one time would have greeted such a claim. Literary critics find it hard to accept that one whose priorities were ordered so differently from their own could treat the genre seriously, while churchmen have naturally sought his larger achievement elsewhere. In the cultural divide which Newman himself predicted in The Idea of a University, a unified response to his varied achievements as a writer becomes increasingly difficult. And yet the originality of both his novels, and his sustained engagement with the form over many years, are now surely less in doubt. In his approach to the novel, as in so...