Beginning and Advanced Spiritual Directors. The Developmental Influences That Shape Their Practice

While Howells's fictions might themselves demur at providing specific prescriptions for the social ills they depict, they nonetheless emerge from very specific social and political contexts that shape their general themes. Just before beginning Annie Kilburn, Howells had announced his intention of bringing attention to the injustice of the hanging of four anarchist laborers after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886. While the novel has little to do with the actual historical occurrence or the specific issues related to it, in depicting Annie's haplessness at finding the proper means of exercising her conscience it does nonetheless underscore Howells's belief that what is at stake in the struggle of the workers is not charity, but justice. This conviction is laid out much more elaborately in the more complex A Hazard of New Fortunes, written right after Annie Kilburn. Simply stated, Hazard expands on the ideological conflict represented in Annie Kilburn in the tension between Mr. Gerrish and the Reverend Mr. Peck ...»