Caryll Houselander: A Biography

This biography tells the life of the elusive 20th-century English writer, Caryll Houselander, who saved no personal letters (although, fortunately, others saved their letters from her) and left only her books, which included a short autobiography, a few classics of Catholic spirituality, and some unpublished personal scratchings. She never had robust health, and mentally she had the tendency to live in her own world. Her one aim in life, as she discovered from adolescence onward (although it would take many years for her to state it this way), was to see the suffering Christ in humanity. The opportunity for this discovery had already been given to her: a broken home, which she experienced at the age of 9, and thus she and her sister were subsequently brought up in convent boarding schools.

Born in 1901, Caryll was of the generation that lived through two world wars, and by the time of the second she had already been marked by the first. In between the two were the days of wandering: art school, bohemianism (a tendency that would always remain with her), a love affair, self-torture as she desperately sought to find herself in her search for God. Living in London during the entire Second World War, she found herself at the heart of catastrophe in the form of nightly bombing, known as the Blitz. The suffering of human beings in war, which she equated with the suffering Body of Christ, led to her first book, This War is the Passion. Other books followed, all circling around the Christ-life. Her own life was cut short by cancer, about which she wrote, as if matter-of-factly making plans for the day ahead (she had long since found God--or, perhaps, in the way of the poet Francis Thompson, whom she admired, God had found her): "Well, if God wants me to die, it's all right."