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Travel artifacts from author Graham Greene signifying his many trips, during which he often passed time with Travel Scrabble.

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‘SOMETHING TO MEASURE FROM’ AT BOSTON COLLEGE w/1 cut

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CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. — An exhibit showcasing renowned British Catholic authors ranging from Evelyn Waugh, John Henry Cardinal Newman and Graham Greene to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton is on view at Boston College’s John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections.

The exhibit, “…something to measure from,” is in the main exhibit floor of Burns Library through September 14.

The exhibit, which includes items never before displayed in the United States, is comprised of correspondence, manuscripts, posters, photographs, publications and other papers and items drawn from Boston College’s celebrated British Catholic Authors Collection. The collection seeks to document the British Catholic experience from Catholic Emancipation in 1829 to the present time.

The Burns Library is well known for the significance of its holdings related to leading Catholic writers from the British Isles, among them John Henry Cardinal Newman, who was a leader at Oxford University and in the Church of England when he shocked both communities by announcing his decision to join the Catholic Church in 1845.

Other authors in the collection include Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, Wilfrid Meynell, Alice Meynell, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. The materials showcased in this exhibit reflect the many accomplishments of those writers and their contemporaries as well as the contributions of David Jones, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

Burns Library is home to a rich archive of material related to Graham Greene, the novelist, playwright, journalist and Catholic convert who was known for novels that explored life’s moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings.

This exhibit celebrates the addition of three major collections to the Burns Library: the Alfred Noyes Papers, the Anthony Rhodes Papers and the Peter Milward, SJ, Papers.

There are many connections, within the same generation and from one generation to another, reflected in the items chosen for the exhibit, according to its curator, Burns Library chief archivist David Horn, who notes that the title of the exhibit is drawn from a comment by Muriel Spark, the English novelist best known for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: “Spark, a convert to Catholicism, once said that her new faith ‘…provided my norm, …[gave me] something to measure from,’” said Horn.

Other English writers, many of them represented in the collections of the John J. Burns Library at Boston College, have made similar statements about the influence of the Catholic faith on their writings, he said.

The John J. Burns Library at Boston College, is at 140 Commonwealth Avenue. For information, 617-552-3282.