[A Prayer Book owned by Katharine Burdekin (aka Murray Constantine):] The Daily Service-Book of the Church of England, containing the Book of Common Prayer [&c.]
[Burdekin (Katharine)]
Publication details: Oxford: Printed at the University Press for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, n.d. [circa1905,]
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A resonant artefact from the childhood of novelist Katharine Burdekin, ne Cade - highly symbolic when considered through the prism of her subsequent work, under either her married name or the later pseudonym of 'Murray Constantine', wherein ritual performance, often invoking (with degrees of irony) the Christian liturgy directly, is a recurrent trope. As Matthew Taunton, in his recent essay on 'Katharine Burdekin and Collective Speech', identifies, the opening of her most famous novel, 'Swastika Night', offers perhaps the outstanding example - her depiction of the 'Thingspiel' featuring a Nazi creed adapted from the Apostle's Creed in the Book of Common Prayer. Further references are found in the 1929 Burdekin novel 'The Rebel Passion', whose broad historical sweep engages with both Reformation and contemporary debates (in the case of the latter, seen as an effect of the Great War) regarding the validity of the prayer-book's 1662 text - the narrator, Giraldus, enthralled by its 'deep, strong, resonant English [...] very beautiful'. 'Proud Man' (1934), written as 'Murray Constantine', quotes directly from the same (calling it 'one of [the Priest, Andrew's] ritual books').This gift dates from the final years of the family's residence in their ancestral county of Derbyshire (her great-great-grandfather was the painter, Joseph Wright), in the house where she - like her elder sister, Rowena (pioneering founder of the Minack Theatre, following relocation to Cornwall) - was born and received her early education (both subsequently attended Cheltenham Ladies' College). The religious aspect of that education, exemplified by this document, is evidently one that continued to exert an influence, even within the more critical attitude of her mature outlook.