Caryll Houselander – författare

It is in the relationship of Christ with his mother that we can see God`s design for the relationship of every mother and child.Caryll Houselander’s spirituality is very much a spirituality of the twentieth century.The Mother of Christ, first published posthumously in 1978, draws together two of her favourite themes: Our Lady, and suffering.

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.

It is in the relationship of Christ with his mother that we can see God`s design for the relationship of every mother and child.Caryll Houselander's spirituality is very much a spirituality of the twentieth century.The Mother of Christ, first published posthumously in 1978, draws together two of her favourite themes: Our Lady, and suffering.

Although forgotten until quite recently, Caryll Houselander, who died in 1954, was a sensitive and profound English Roman Catholic writer on Christian spirituality. In this critical edition of her 1949 book The Passion of the Infant Christ, Houselander argues that the physical world is an "inscaped" revelation of the mind of the Creator. Every concrete object and every temporal event mirrors the eternal, just as the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus mirror the circumstances surrounding his death and resurrection. Editor Kerry Walters discusses both Houselander''s life and the primary themes of The Passion of the Infant Christ in his introduction to this critical edition of one of Houselander''s most insightful books.

“I was received into the church,” states Caryll Houselander at the very beginning of this work “when I was six years old. Strictly speaking, therefore, I am not a ‘cradle’ Catholic, but a rocking-horse Catholic.”This autobiography, first published in 1955, takes the reader from the author’s Catholic childhood and school days through a period outside the church while she tried to make her living as an artist, to a return to the church. This return was brought about by her insight, so central to all her books into the presence of Christ and others.A theologian in every sense of the word except the formal academic one, Caryll Houselander understood the central importance of one’s image or concept of God.“Caryll Houselander: artist, odd ball, mystic, friend, and in the end, suffering servant. In the midst of her last illness, she clung to life, loved life with a passion that did not want to die. ‘I honestly long,’ she said, ‘to be told ‘a hundred percent cure’ and to return to this life and celebrate it with gramophone records, giggling and gin.’”—Mitch Finley, Our Sunday VisitorAs a classic in spirituality, the work of Caryll Houselander is very close to the top of the list.

"Houselander nos enseña a unir nuestra voluntad a la de Dios, a ejemplo de la Santísima Virgen María" (Scott Hahn). "Trata sobre el viaje espiritual de todo cristiano en su búsqueda de la santidad" (John Wauck, New Oxford Review).En estas meditaciones inspiradoras, la autora muestra el lado más humano de la Madre de Dios, como un junco que espera el soplo divino para que suene a través de ella la música de Dios y comunique al mundo la belleza de su amor. La autora nos presenta varios momentos clave de la vida de María, de oración permanente para todo cristiano.