Mater Purissima, Frederick Goodall

The title of the painting the reproduction of which had so affected me was Mater Purissima. […] The painter was an Englishman of the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century whose name I forgot almost as soon as I had read it. Although the reproduction was in black and white, I was sometimes able to visualise a coloured version of the image of the young woman. It occurs to me today that the original of the painted image may well have been posed so that her face and shoulders were lit by way of some or another translucent window high above her and out of the scope of the painting. In my coloured version this light would surely have been a red-gold. The young woman was depicted as being clothed in an ankle-length robe with a transparent veil over her hair and holding a dove in each hand. Her hands were so positioned that each dove rested against one of her breasts. […] (I seem not to have noticed what I most notice now when I recall the image-birds: their improbable docility; they rest comfortably in the hands of the young woman with their own rounded breasts suggesting the shape of what lies hidden behind them under the folds of the young woman's robe and with their bright eyes focused, so it seems, on the same point of interest that the Most Pure Mother looks towards. Their pose is absurdly calm; they bear n oresemblance to any of the struggling, frantic birds that I sometimes tried to hold as a boy.)

Gillian Tindall, from the dust jacket of
The Born Exile: George Gissing

George Gissing female biographers:

• Gillian Tindall - The Born Exile: George Gissing, 1974.
• May Yates (Mary Ann Yates Corkling) - George Gissing: An Appreciation, 1922.
• Mabel Collins Donnelly - George Gissing: Grave Comedian, 1954.
• Emma Liggins - George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture, 2006.