by Margot King

(from the Introduction to the forthcoming biography)

An unlikely spiritual heroine emerged in England during the dark days of the Second World War. In 1941 Caryll Houselander, a reclusive English laywoman, startled the American Catholic reading public with a modest little book on suffering. A remarkable collection of essays, This War is the Passion1 was the fruit of a long and private mystical apprenticeship and was enthusiastically received by lay people and religious alike. Practical, humorous, compassionate and down-to-earth, Caryll spoke directly to those suffering the horrors of war by showing how, by a willing acceptance of suffering, each person has a role to play in the redemption of the world.

Although she was plagued by ill health from her childhood, Caryll’s literary and artistic output2 was prodigious and by no means the result of physical vitality. Beginning in 1927 until her death in 1954, Caryll Houselander wrote and published constantly and with the publication of This War is the Passion in 1941, she became one of the most popular and highly respected religious writers of the period.

Praised not only by such Catholic luminaries as Mgr. Ronald Knox who wished that Caryll would “establish a school of spirituality,”3 she was also acknowledged in the Anglican Church Times as “one of the greatest of the modern heroines of the Church of God,”4 and although the Salvation Army allowed that “Caryll Houselander might not square with a rigid nonconformist conscience,” it was high in its praise for her: “she had a mystical experience of God, a practical charity and an utter selflessness which we could well covet.”5

There were, however, a few exceptions to the Houselander cult, and I was one of them. Although long acquainted with her writing, I had dismissed her work as piously sentimental and had discarded it, along with most of the devotional literature urged upon me by the priests and nuns of my youth. It was not until 1984 that I again stumbled unexpectedly upon Caryll Houselander. The chance encounter left me at first intrigued, then interested and finally compelled by the extraordinary story of this complex woman.

At the time I was working as a librarian at a college in western Canada and was the editor of a small journal devoted to the writings of mediaeval mystic women.6 It was the first season of the British television mini-series, Reilly, Ace of Spies,7 and I was soon caught up in the adventures of the swashbuckling bigamous “master spy,” Sidney Reilly (the model, it is said, for Ian Fleming’s James Bond8) and his many romantic entanglements. To my astonishment, among the women who had succumbed to Reilly’s charms was none other than Caryll Houselander, portrayed in the series by actress Joanne Pearce as a fey and wispy artist whose youth, talent and spirituality attracted the world-weary Reilly.

My curiosity whetted, I pulled from the shelf Houselander’s autobiography, A Rocking-Horse Catholic,9 and a biography written by Maisie Ward, one of her publishers a few years after her death in 1954.10 A few pages and I was spellbound; here was a twentieth-century woman whose accounts of her visions were as authentic as those of any medieval mystic I had described in my publication but who, unlike her spiritual foremothers, loved a tipple or three, used strong and occasionally coarse language and told vulgar jokes. Certainly no holy woman I had previously encountered had been a chain smoker, although Caryll’s attempts to kick the habit have all the overtones of the harsh ascetic struggles of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. Here was copy indeed for my little journal!

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1 This War is the Passion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1941; London: Sheed and Ward, 1943).

2 From 1924 to 1954, Caryll published an astonishingly large number of books, articles, stories, poems and drawings but the total of 902 items does not include the vast number of private letters she wrote to friends and to those readers who had asked for spiritual direction.

3 Quoted from Introduction to Maisie Ward. Caryll Houselander: That Divine Eccentric. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962).

4 “A Christian Heroine.” Church Times, (29 November 1962). Archives of the University of Notre Dame, CSWD 12/16.

5 “An Odd Saint.” The Officer 14/1 (January/February 1963) 38. Thanks to Karen Thompson, a researcher at the Salvation Army International Heritage Centre for supplying this review to me. A copy can also be found at the Archives of the University of Notre Dame, CSWD 12/16.

6 Vox Benedictina (Saskatoon, Toronto: Peregrina Publishing Co., 1984–1995).

7 “Reilly Ace of Spies,” starring Sam Neill as Sidney Reilly, was made by Euston Films, a division of Thames Television, and was first shown in the United Kingdom in September/November 1983 on ITV and in the U.S. on PBS in 1984. Reilly Ace of Spies a TV Times Special tie-in published in 1983 by Independent Television Books Ltd.

8 Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond thrillers and a former officer of the Naval Intelligence Directorate, is reported to have said, “James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know!”: Robin Bruce Lockhart, Reilly: Ace of Spies. (1967, 1983; rpt. London: Robin Clark, 1992) 13. Other models for the Bond template have been suggested, notably Sir Fitzroy Maclean. See Alan Massie, “Will the Real 007 Ever Break from Cover?” Sunday Times (London 6 October 2002) 4.

9 A Rocking-Horse Catholic (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955). Following Caryll’s instructions, the book was not published in England until 1960, after her father had died.

10 With her husband Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward was the co-founder of Sheed and Ward, Caryll’s publisher.

An excerpt from the bibliography of the works of Caryll Houselander.