Carryll Houselander: That Divine Eccentric

Dubbed “that divine eccentric,” Caryll Houselander married prodigious artistic and literary talents with unstinting devotion to the poor, the sick, and the sinners in her midst. Ronald Knox said that she “seemed to see everything for the first time, and…seemed to find no difficulty in getting the right word; no, not merely the right word, the telling word, that left you gasping.” In her own words, “broken across psychologically” by neuroses and temptations, “not by nature patient, kind, gentle,” Houselander’s critical faculty made charity a constant challenge—despite her persistent efforts to “see Christ in everyone.” Nevertheless, her distinguishing characteristic was a deep, genuine love of God, finding expression in a mysticism which ultimately kept her sane and centered on Christ until her untimely death at the age of fifty-four. In this absorbing, competently crafted biography, Maisie Ward pays tribute to a woman who offered her very self unreservedly to Christ and his brethren, from greatest to least. Caryll Divine Eccentric shows clearly that, like her written works, Houselander herself is “still alive, still contemporary.”