Caryll Houselander: A Biography

This biography tells the life of the elusive twentieth-century English writer, Caryll Houselander, who saved no personal letters and left only her books, which included a short autobiography, a few classics of Catholic spirituality including The Reed of God and The Flowering Tree, and various unpublished personal scratchings. She never had robust health, and mentally had the tendency to live in her own world. Her one aim in life, discovered from adolescence onward, was to see the suffering Christ in humanity.

Born in 1901, Houselander was of the generation that lived through two world wars. In between the two were days of wandering: art school, bohemianism, a love affair, and self-torture as she desperately sought to find herself in her search for God. Living in London during World War II, she found herself at the heart of catastrophe in the form of the Blitz, and came to understand human suffering firsthand. She also developed a wicked sense of humor and a quality for seeing into things that many around her termed a “sixth sense.” Houselander’s life was cut short by cancer, but not before earning a reputation as a Catholic eccentric.

Mary Frances Coady