In the English-speaking world, the Catholic Literary Revival is
typically associated with the work of G. K. Chesterton/Hilaire
Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. But in fact the Revival's
most numerous members were women. While some of these women remain
well known?Muriel Spark, Antonia White, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy
Day?many have been almost entirely forgotten. They include: Enid
Dinnis, Anna Hanson Dorsey, Alice Thomas Ellis, Eleanor Farjeon,
Rumer Godden, Caroline Gordon, Clotilde Graves, Caryll Houselander,
Sheila Kaye-Smith, Jane Lane, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Alice Meynell,
Kathleen Raine, Pearl Mary Teresa Richards, Edith Sitwell, Gladys
Bronwyn Stern, Josephine Ward, and Maisie Ward. There are various
reasons why each of these writers fell out of print: changes in the
commercial publishing world after World War II, changes within the
Church itself and in the English-speaking universities that
redefined the literary canon in the last decades of the 20th
century. Yet it remains puzzling that a body of writing so
creative, so attuned to its historical moment, and so unique in its
perspective on the human condition, should have fallen into
obscurity for so long. The Catholic Women Writers series brings
together the English-language prose works of Catholic women from
the 19th and 20th centuries; work that is of interest to a broad
range of readers. Each volume is printed with an accessible but
scholarly introduction by theologians and literary specialists. The
first volume in the series is Caryll Houselander's The Dry Wood.
Houselander is known primarily for her spiritual writings but she
also wrote one novel, set in a post-war London Docklands parish.
There a motley group of lost souls are mourning the death of their
saintly priest and hoping for the miraculous healing of a
vulnerable child whose gentleness in the face of suffering brings
conversion to them all in surprising and unexpected ways. The Dry
Wood offers a vital contribution to the modern literary canon and a
profound meditation on the purpose of human suffering.
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