fringe of my soul's deep discontent". Following her crisis, Grey did not identify with any single strand of Christianity, and remained critical of the Anglican church. She later wrote that she "imbibed from childhood the widest ideas of vital Christianity, only it was Christianity. I have not much sympathy with the Church. She began to speak directly to God in her prayers: In mid-1847 Grey visited her brother in County Laois, Ireland. It was at the height of the Great Famine and the first time she had come into contact with widespread suffering among the poor; she was deeply affected by her experiences and later recalled that "As a young girl, I had no conception of the full meaning of the misery I saw around me, yet it printed itself upon my brain and memory." Early married life; 1850–1864 By 1850 Grey had grown close to George Butler, a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, whom she had met at several of the balls hosted around County Durham. By October that year George was sending her self-penned poems; the couple were engaged in January 1851 and married in January 1852. The Butlers set up home at 124, High Street, Oxford. George was a scholar and cleric and shared with his wife a commitment to liberal reforms and a love of Italian culture. The couple also both had a strong Christian belief and Josephine Butler later wrote of her husband that they often "prayed together that a holy revolution might come about and that the Kingdom of God might be established on the earth". In November 1852 the Butlers had a son, George Grey Butler, followed by a second, Arthur Stanley—known as Stanley—in May 1854. Butler's later memories of Oxford were of a closeted and misogynist community lacking in family life; she was often the only female at social gatherings and would listen in anger to what her biographer Judith Walkowitz describes as "the open acceptance of the double standard by the gentlemen of the university". Butler was offended by a discussion regarding the publication in 1853 of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Ruth in which the heroine is seduced by a man of means and subsequently abandoned. Butler saw that the male conversationalists considered it natural that a "moral lapse in a woman was spoken of as an immensely worse thing than in a man"; she decided not to voice her feelings on