The editor of this last volume in the series of Newman's Letters and diaries (except for two forthcoming volumes, one of which is to be devoted to letters that have come to light since publication of the previous volumes), has maintained the high editorial standards which he displayed in volume ix.

This volume encompasses the last stages of Newman's protracted ‘Anglican death bed’, covering the publication of the controversial Lives of the English saints, the publication of William George Ward's Ideal of a Christian Church (1844) and its later condemnation by Oxford University's Convocation (along with a failed attempt to condemn Tract 90, thanks to the intervention of the two proctors) on 13 February 1845, a revealing correspondence over conversion to Rome with Miss Mary Holmes and Mrs William Froude respectively, the genesis and publication of Newman's celebrated Essay on the development of Christian doctrine (1845) and the final chapter in Newman's religious journey: his admission into the Roman Catholic Church on 9 October 1845.

As with volume ix (where he reproduced the Anglican episcopal Charges), Francis McGrath has performed a great scholarly service by his inclusion of detailed appendices comprising several key documents which shed much light on events at Oxford and on Newman himself (not least, his last Anglican sermons) on the eve and time of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. It is particularly valuable to have a detailed selection of newspaper and periodical reactions to Newman's reception into the Catholic Church, especially in the wake of Erik Sidenvall's perceptive recent study of responses to Newman's conversion, After anti-Catholicism: John Henry Newman and Protestant Britain, 1845–c. 1890 (London–New York 2005). Moreover, the inclusion within the text itself of extracts from popular journals of the day such as Jackson's Oxford Journal, helps contextualise and give added ‘colour’ to the various Oxford controversies being discussed in Newman's correspondence.

As in the introduction to volume ix, the authorities of the University of Oxford (the Heads of Houses and Hebdomadal Board) are represented in an unflattering light. The editor perhaps accepts too uncritically the axioms of Tractarian historiography and does not do adequate justice to the difficult situation in which the Heads of Houses, as guardians of university subscription, found themselves. For example, it is somewhat misleading to present the unsuccessful attempt of the university's vice-chancellor and Hebdomadal Board to draw up a ‘new test’ to impose a particular interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles as ‘an obligatory Low Church or Liberal interpretation’ (p. xxvi). On the contrary, a majority of the Heads of Houses who attempted to impose this restriction were traditional High Churchmen and the opposition to it came as much from a new generation of Oxford Liberals such as A. P. Stanley as it did from the Tractarians themselves. Newman himself, as is shown in more than one letter, felt detached from this episode and proffered no grounds of opposition to the move.

The sheer number of letters reproduced, covering so relatively short a time span (1 November 1843–6 October 1845), is a great achievement. The two letters to William Froude (then moving in a diametrically opposite direction from Newman – towards scepticism) and sixteen letters to Mrs William (Catherine) Froude, though well known and worked upon by Newman scholars, form perhaps the highlight of this volume. They reveal to the reader, in all their original freshness and clarity, the process of Newman's intellectual, doctrinal and spiritual progress from the beginning of the Oxford Movement up until the eve and moment of his final conversion to Rome, in a more pronounced way than in even the Apologia pro vita sua, hurriedly composed with all the advantages but also limitations of hindsight some twenty years later. This is especially the case in regard to the epistolatory unfolding of Newman's own carefully formulated doctrine of development (though of course its origins predated the period covered in this volume). In these letters, Newman for the first time committed to paper the profoundly unsettling nature of the impact on his Anglican allegiance of his study in the summer of 1839 of the Monophysite controversy and, more especially, of Nicholas Wiseman's subsequent article in the Dublin Review on the Donatist heresy. However, because at this stage Newman was not concerned as he was to be in the Apologia with refuting the charge of lying laid against him by Charles Kingsley, in the letters to the Froudes his focus was more on simply stating the arguments through which he came to renounce the Church of England.

The letters to John William Bowden, who died on 15 September 1844, and whom Newman described as ‘my oldest friend’, and the numerous letters (twenty-five in all) to his widow (born Elizabeth Swinburne, and aunt of the poet) are written in a different key, but are also moving testimonies to Newman's capacity for human friendship and sympathy. Newman's patience and delicacy as well as firmness of touch are well exemplified in his somewhat fraught correspondence with an often difficult, exasperating and sometimes hysterical female would-be spiritual acolyte, Mary Holmes. No less than thirty of Newman's letters to her (twenty-seven of which are original autographs) are reproduced in this volume. The other most numerous recipient of Newman's letters in this volume, apart from Pusey, was James Toovey (1813–93), the London bookseller who published The lives of the English saints, after Francis Rivington (publisher of the Tracts for the times) had given up the series in autumn 1843.

However, perhaps the most moving and revealing letter of all in the volume as a whole is that to Henry Wilberforce (27 April 1845) containing Newman's anguished reflections on the sad fate of his recently deceased old Oriel College friend, Blanco White, who, after passing through Unitarianism, had embraced ‘Pantheism’ and finally abandoned Christianity altogether. Newman felt that White's fate offered a dreadful warning on the perils of religious liberalism, but he was also struck by the incongruity (and was perhaps embarrassed) of the fact that White almost alone still spoke of him with affection at the end. Newman allowed a note of self-pity to emerge, noting to Henry Wilberforce that ‘The mass of men in Oxford who know me a little, have shown a coldness and suspicion which I do not deserve. In the affair of No. 90, few indeed showed me any sympathy, or gave me reason to believe that I was at all in their hearts.’ Newman's only too human reaction to the apparent loss of his friends and supporters is here poignantly laid bare.

The introductory note to this volume, charting these episodes and events, and Newman's rich and varied correspondence which cover them, is much shorter than that in volume ix. However, this commendable brevity is somewhat offset by the editor's occasional use of too colloquial a style. Stylistic infelicities include ‘in denial’, ‘turn a blind eye to’, and ‘everything in the garden … was rosy’ (p. xix), and ‘saving the University … shooting itself in the foot’. There are also rather too many exclamation marks. There is also one minor slip in the index where, on p. 987, Thomas Mozley (1806–93), Newman's brother-in-law, is described as ‘wife of his eldest sister, Harriett’, rather than husband.

These lapses, however, should be seen as minor blemishes and not as detracting from the deep scholarship, research and painstaking industry and labour which has clearly gone into the completion of this work. It is, moreover, clear that for McGrath this editorial work has been a scholarly labour of love, his own knowledge and understanding of Newman having been amply demonstrated in several previous publications. McGrath has superbly rounded off the last in the series of Newman's Letters and diaries, which has been forty-five years in production, and has ensured that Newman will continue to ‘speak’ through his private letters and memoranda as well as published sermons. In physical terms the Oxford University Press has produced an appropriately handsome volume.