Review: Walter Pater, The Collected Works of Walter Pater Vol. IV: Gaston de Latour, ed. by Gerald Monsman (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Abstract

Gerald Monsman’s edition (2019) of Pater’s final and unfinished novel Gaston de Latour is one of the initial two volumes (the other being Lene Østermark-Johansen’s edition of Imaginary Portraits) to be published in the new Oxford University Press Collected Works of Walter Pater, with Lesley Higgins and David Latham as General Editors. Along with Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater’s earlier novel of first-century Rome, Gaston de Latour was apparently intended to be part of a projected trilogy with each novel located in a different historical era. Gaston is set in sixteenth-century France in the years after the Reformation, and its eponymous hero is an observer whose meditative consciousness soaks up the religious, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic atmosphere of his age. He comes into contact with many of the period’s significant figures: Pierre de Ronsard, leader of the Pléiade school of poetry, the philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne, the Italian Dominican friar and thinker Giordano Bruno, Queen Marguerite, wife of Henry of Navarre III (later Henry IV of France), and Henry himself.