In 1864 Newman  wrote up the first 44 years of his life from a different vantage point from the earlier contemporaneously documented facts. As late as 1844 he could still not be absolutely sure that his Anglican story was going to end in conversion to Roman Catholicism. What if at least some Anglican bishops and professors at Oxtord University had changed their minds and begun to swing behind his Tract 90? 

So, according to Frank Turner, "Newman of the Apologia" portrayed himself (nonfactually) as moving always, logically, sincerely, reluctantly and for purely intellectual reasons towards Rome. In APOLOGIA he also misleadingly downplayed his passionate dislike of Evangelical Protestantism by recasting his earlier religious foe as generic "liberalism." By outwriting and outliving the many contemporaries  who called attention to this deception, Newman caused generations of future historians to take his rewrite as gospel and lazily and uncritically to stop reading crucial earlier works by both "the Newman of history" and by his critics. 

By the 1980s, if not earlier, Frank Turner suspected that Newman’s APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA inaccurately spun much of Newman's time (1801-1845) in the Church of England. Well before the end of the 19th Century, the 1864  APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA and its retrospective version of the author's 44 years as an Anglican had eclipsed all other sources on Newman's life, including contemporary critics of APOLOGIA's sincerity and accuracy. Turner argues that later historians then largely chose to spare themselves the trouble of rereading not just Newman’s works in their later bound volumes (much less in their original, unedited pamphlets or magazines), but lazily and uncritically took the APOLOGIA as gospel truth. Over time the much revised literary classics of Newman triumphed over the duller and less read volumes both of his Tractarian collaborators and of his critics. The critics  were largely forgotten. Thus Newman, in the end outwriting and outliving his foes, emerged as the sole consulted source and authority for all too many recent researchers.

Turner’s recent book reinterprets Newman’s Anglican years with as little as may be reliance on the APOLOGIA.  The latest Newman work trusted by Frank Turner is the collection of Newman's 12 sermons of 1850 on CERTAIN DIFFICULTIES FELT BY ANGLICANS. To achieve his book's goal of understanding the Newman of history, "...the choice has been to take Newman at his word in 1850 rather than in 1864." (Turner, NEWMAN, p. 23) Professor Turner's method entails (a) both relying on accounts by Newman and others contemporary with events described and also (b) speculatively and retroactively applying to Newman and confreres insights from recent scholarship in fields not related directly either to Newman or to Newman’s Tractarian Movement. 

Turner, historian not hagiographer, limns an untidy, driven, disruptive, Anglican “Newman of history” who is distinctly different from the carefully crafted, controlled Roman Catholic “Newman of the APOLOGIA.” Newman of the APOLOGIA is a literary creation which contemporaries who knew him well often rejected as fictional. .