26 Jun Victor Hugo in Exile, by Mrs Bartle Teeling
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The Star (Guernsey), May 4, 1880
Mrs Bartle Teeling: Theodora M. Louisa Lane Clarke (1851-1906), L'Hyvreuse Lodge, Cambridge Park, Guernsey [1869 list]. Only child of the Rev. Thomas Clarke, Rector of Woodeaton, Oxford, and Louisa Lane, author of topographical and historical works on the Channel Islands. After her father’s death she returned to Guernsey with her mother in 1865. She married (1879) Bartholomew (or Bartle) Teeling (1848-1921), Captain in the Rifle Brigade, Secretary (1872) of the Catholic Union of Ireland, Private Chamberlain to the Pope. She published journalism, a story, a play, music, sometimes as 'Norman Stuart' or 'Isola'Mrs. Bartle Teeling (nee Theodora Louisa Lane Clarke) was born in Guernsey, but passed her childhood in Woodeaten, Oxford, where her father was rector. On his death his widow returned with their only child to Guernsey, and became there a centre of literary and scientific interest and mental activity as student and writer of natural history, etc., and author of several scientific manuals. Mrs. Lane Clarke was a strong Protestant, but her daughter, the subject of this sketch, after years of anxious thought and deep but solitary research, for she had not a single Catholic acquaintance, was received into the Church. Shortly after her conversion, while she was still under twenty-one, she made her first essay in literature, at the request of Father Lockhart, in the Lamp, of which he was editor.’ The Sacred Heart Review, Volume 19, Number 1, 1 January 1898Victor Hugo in exile By Theodora Louisa Lane Teeling, author of ‘Roman Violets.’ From The Irish Monthly.* Some years ago – from 1856 down to the fatal time of Sedan and Bazeilles, of Strasbourg and Metz, of war, disaster, and failure, which has been called, only too truly, L’Annee Terrible – a little rock-bound island off the coast of France, English in name, Norman by law and lineage, held, in impatient exile, one of this century’s greatest poets. Visitors to the quiet spot, wandering along its narrow quays, or threading their way amongst a crowd of battered and dirty carriages, worn old vehicles, which jolted out their last days as omnibuses, plying between the microscopic township of St Peters-port and St Sampsons, were often called upon by their guides to look upwards a the quaint, irregular, foreign-looking hill-slope, covered with houses and terraced gardens, and crowned with waving trees, to where, among a row of tall, well-built mansions, one stood distinguished form the rest by a curious, square kind of glass-house or conservatory on its roof. ‘That is Victor Hugo’s house,’ their cicerone would tell them. And not unfrequently the poet himself might be seen, in that quaint ‘belvedere,’ or glass-room, where he always wrote, leaning from the open window, and looking straight before him out to sea, across the rippling, blue water, and the little boats dancing on it below, away beyond the long purple-cliffed island of Serk, to where a faint coast-line melted into sky in the far instance.