Sally Read, born in East Anglia in 1971 and now living near Rome, was a secular poet before she was a Catholic poet. Determinedly secular, too, as she relates in her new memoir, The Mary Pages: An Atheist’s Journey to the Mother of God (Word on Fire).
Raised by an atheist father who scorned all things religious, in a country that had stripped its churches bare of iconography (especially all that was Marian) centuries before, and imbibing to the full the defiant feminism that marks our current culture, Read unsurprisingly regarded the Mother of God, at least as the Catholic Church views her, with faint contempt. “How best to shut a woman up?” she once mused as she she contemplated Mary’s seeming irrelevance to contemporary women’s issues such as genital mutilation, date rape, and domestic violence. “Put her on a pedestal, and give her a crown.”
The Mary Pages is not a conversion story. Read has already told that story, of her nine-month journey in 2010 from cynical atheism to the Catholic Church, in a 2016 memoir, Night’s Bright Darkness. Nor is The Mary Pages a conventional autobiography; it seems purposely vague on detail. Instead, it is a story, meticulously and beautifully written, of how Mary insinuated herself into Read’s internal life so thoroughly, starting in childhood, that she would be inevitably led to Mary’s Son. The medium was art. Read’s grandmother had a copy of a Raphael Madonna hanging on a wall. The mother and baby mesmerized the unchurched little girl who scarcely knew who Mary was.
Later, Read went to nursing school in London, where she found herself haunting the National Gallery’s Renaissance rooms with their myriad images of Mary—and then hanging a print in her bedroom of Filippo Lippi’s radiant Madonna and Child With Two Angels. The story behind the painting overwhelmed her as much as the painting itself. The model for the Virgin had been a Dominican novice-nun, Lucrezia Buti, with whom Lippi, although a professed friar, had fallen in love. One day he kidnapped Lucrezia from a procession and seduced her. She eventually bore him two children, but even when released from his vows and given ecclesial permission to wed, he refused to marry her.
That resonated with Read, who herself was seeing a man, a doctor she calls Mischa (she has altered identifying information for most of those she writes about), who declined to commit himself to her because he already had a live-in partner, a woman physician at his hospital. Read’s relationship with Mischa was misery (“a kind of slavery,” she writes), but he did one thing for her: He encouraged her to keep writing the poetry she was already starting to write. He brought her books by women poets he thought would inspire her: Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds. They did. If you have read Read’s poems (some are online), either pre-or post-conversion (where her subjects are nearly entirely Christological), you will find the powerful rhythms, minutely focused examinations of the natural world and the human body, and the naked emotional engagement that mark the work of Plath and Olds. Read’s years in the secular literary world did not go to waste.
She got up at 5:30 every morning to write furiously, then worked a shift at a psychiatric hospital tending the human dregs and outcasts no one else seemed to care about. She collected Marian art in her apartment—but at the same time she was composing a feminist poem that would portray the Virgin as a pregnant rape victim who had to invent the Annunciation as a cover story: “I could not tolerate a male God—and Mary, I suspected as much, was inextricable from him.” Read’s mental images of Mary were refracted into other wounded women: Lucrezia Buti; Elizabeth Siddal, the copper-haired model for many a pre-Raphaelite painting of Mary who killed herself like Sylvia Plath when her artist/poet husband, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, had an affair with another of his models; Princess Diana, then at the height of public pity for her and also made violently dead, in 1997. Read enrolled in a graduate writing program on the American “Plains” (the University of South Dakota, according to her Wikipedia biography), where her friends, like her, were women left stranded by men, sometimes with children to raise alone
She returned to London, and then, somewhere and somehow (remember, this is not an autobiography) she met the man who became her husband: Fabio, an Italian. They moved first to his native Sardinia, then to the Roman seaside suburb of Santa Marinella. All over Sardinia—in roadside shrines, bars, schools, grocery stores–were plaster and wooden statues of the Madonna, sometimes wearing a lace dress and blonde wig, like a doll. Read found them repulsive, and she chafed under the unwritten rules of traditional Mediterranean society, where respectable women did not go out at night alone, and her visiting female friends, bohemian free spirits who flirted and more with the local shepherds, drew the wrath of her in-laws, who deemed them loose women. In Santa Marinella a church housed La Madonnina, a small statue of Mary, a souvenir from Medjugorje, that was said to weep human blood from time to time. “This florid thing…only distanced Mary further from me,” Read writes. “The bloody face was like something from a horror movie.”
The turning point came—although it would be another four years formally—when she gave birth to her daughter, Celia Florence, in a Roman hospital. She had had trouble getting pregnant, and the labor was prolonged and excruciating (the baby’s head wasn’t positioned optimally). Alone in her hospital bed in her agony (husbands weren’t allowed bedside in Roman maternity wards), she realized that Mary had also been alone when Jesus was born, because as it is with all women in childbirth, “[n]o one, not even her husband, could possibly imagine what was happening to her.”
“Alone of all your sex,” -[the fifth-century Latin poet] Sedulius wrote, and the feminists seized on this as example of the Virgin’s difference, her exceptionality, her exceptional holiness, her exceptional loneliness—her special subordination to God and man….But what I will arrive at, in a shortening number of days, is Mary’s aloneness as the archetype of every woman’s aloneness: Mary as foundress, as defender, as mother-creator, as collider with the harsh, existing world. For in childbirth, there is no act of creation so similar to God’s as he pulled form out of nothing and watched the world spin.
The only thing that I could have wished for more of in this haunting and gorgeous book is the visual images of Mary that have followed Read since her childhood. There are some of them, to be sure: her grandmother’s Raphael, the Filippo Lippi, the striking 1922 statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, whose shrine in her native East Anglia Read visits as a pilgrim in the book’s final pages. I longed to see a photo of La Madonnina, for example. It is also unfortunate that Read’s oeuvre as a poet has been divided in two by her conversion, with each half perhaps rendered inaccessible to admirers of the other. Her first three books of verse, dating from the early 2000s, were published by Bloodaxe Press, a leading British secular publisher of poetry. Her most recent volume, Dawn of This Hunger (Angelico Press, 2021), as well as her memoirs and other prose works, come from Catholic presses, and it would be unfortunate if her secular readers assumed she was addressing her richly laden recent words solely to a Catholic literary ghetto. Sally Read is too fine a stylist and too penetrating an observer for readers of any religious sensibility or none to miss.
Pre-conversion poem:
Gestation
Post-conversion poem:
Anne: The Coming of the Immaculate
At times prayer is wordless, but it fills
the empty night as water fills a lake
with its own meaning. I pray to break
this body with a child, for my taut pelvis
to open and ache its tight basketwork
apart; to yield. Sometimes I sense God
in the darkness—like a heavy leaning
at the door—always with an inexplicable
tenderness in how he does not burst in.
Perhaps he would break me if he did,
so waits instead to pour into my own undoing—
so just when I would moan, It’s done!
that life did not go well, Perfection rests in me,
and I expand, like wood ticking in the sun.
