The Company of Women (1980) is the story of five Catholic women in the early sixties who have met through a series of “working women’s“ retreats, and their devotion to one priest. Father Cyprian is a former “Paraclete” priest, who cannot accept the reforms brewing in the church, and thus has been relieved of his duties and become a secular priest. Although three of the women have been widowed or abandoned by weak men lost to insanity or alcoholism (one is also a bereaved mother), only Charlotte has a child: Felicitas Maria Taylor, called “the one virgin martyr whose name contained some hope for ordinary human happiness” (3).

Felicitas was born with tremendous expectations. Father Cyprian himself was her baptizer, and though Charlotte’s brother was the baby’s one godfather, three of the women thought of themselves as her godmother—though only one of the women drew the longest straw, and actually signed her name to the baptismal certificate. Felicitas, who was only six months old when her father died (Mary Gordon’s father died when she was only five) becomes an extraordinary child. Very smart, and always in the company of adults, Felicitas has nothing in common with other children, a little girl who has books and ideas rather than tea parties and dolls. Charlotte, Felicitas’ mother, looks at her little girl, and visualizes Felicitas “only among the elders, the child in the temple, amazing the scribes with learning.”

It’s around Felicitas (“she’s our only hope” (7), Father Cyprian tells one of the women) that the five women and the priest revolve. Not only the beloved substitute daughter of five mothers, Felicitas is seen by Father Cyprian as his “spiritual prodigy.” Trained by medievalists, Cyprian believes not so much in the modern church as he does in the final word of authority. Father Cyprian, a man who refuses to go to his own dying mother’s bedside, believes it his responsibility to teach this child to reject the things that are “soft” and “womanish.” Father Cyprian tells Felicitas that “we must hate the world to love God” (71). “You are the chosen one” (45) is what Felicitas believes she sees in Father Cyprian’s stare, and “Make straight the way of the Lord” (45) his directive.

As in Mary Gordon’s prize-winning first novel, Final Payments, with Isabel Moore her invalid father’s caretaker, Felicitas Taylor surrenders her life to Father Cyprian. Both the invalid father and Cyprian are authoritarian celibates who are much older than Isabel. Though Father Cyprian hopes to give Felicitas a sharp mind and a clean soul as he prepares her for life in the world, her spiritual and intellectual education leaves her innocent and inexperienced fodder for the amoral Professor Robert Cavendish—who has in common with Father Cyprian only a huge ego. Felicitas’s liaison with Cavendish leaves her pregnant and alone, but it also returns her to the love and support of the only “family” she has ever known. When Felicitas meets Leo, a good and decent owner of a hardware store, she marries him (“It is for shelter that we marry, and make love” [243]), not out of any particular passion, but to give her daughter, Linda, a corporeal father and a normal life. By the end of the novel, through Felicitas, her “mothers” and her “Father” will have reached self-realization, and Felicitas realizes that though Father Cyprian will die, the women will always have each other.

SOURCE
Gordon, Mary. The Company of Women. New York: Random House, 1980.