SHORTHOUSE, JOSEPH HENRY. – English writer, born in Birmingham on 9 September 1834, died at Lansdowne on 4 March 1903.
Although S. wrote other works as well, he is remembered for a single novel: John Inglesant (1860), which projected the religious problems debated in the author’s time by the promoters of the “Oxford Movement” into a faithfully reconstructed seventeenth-century Europe
(the setting of Little Gidding and the mystical poet Crashaw are evoked in it). The novel is the story of the protagonist’s religious crises and, in a certain sense, particularly in the refinement of its writing, anticipates Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and, closer to our own time, the historical-setting novels of Maurice Baring.
BIBL.: M. Polack, The historical, philosophical and religious aspects of John Inglesant, London 1934. Augusto Guidi