Caryll Houselander: Divine Eccentric

by Maisie Ward

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.”

Genres: Biography, Catholic

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Mary Josephine "Maisie" Ward, a descendant of one of Britain's distinguished Catholic families, was a writer, publisher, and speaker.

Ward was born in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight on 4 January 1889, the eldest of the five children of Wilfrid Philip Ward and the novelist Josephine Mary Hope-Scott Ward. On her mother's side she was descended from Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 14th Duke of Norfolk and on her father's side from William George Ward, a prominent member of the Oxford Movement. All four of her grandparents were converts to Roman Catholicism.

She spent her childhood at first on the Isle of Wight, then Eastbourne, and finally in Dorking, before being sent off to board at St Mary's School, Cambridge. Here she was influenced by the preaching of Robert Hugh Benson and inspired by Mary Ward who had founded the order of nuns who ran the school.

Famous in her day as one of the names behind the imprint Sheed & Ward and as a forceful public lecturer in the Catholic Evidence Guild, her reputation has dimmed in subsequent decades. That is an ironic development given that she and her husband were ahead of their time in so many ways, foreshadowing most of what was good about the Second Vatican Council.

Maisie Ward hailed from genteel Victorian blue blood, but she literally earned her own stripes, first as a World War I nurse and then as a writer. She could claim author's rights to the first and only authorized biography of friend G.K. Chesterton – a book which, to this day, remains as galvanizing on its subject as is Chesterton’s own on St. Thomas Aquinas. And she also wrote widely in other areas, including New Testament scholarship, spirituality, and substantive biographies of Newman, her own father, and Robert Browning. Also falling under her pen's purview were the stories of countless saints and lesser notables, among them her personal friend, the accomplished writer and mystic Caryll Houselander (another wrongly overlooked voice).

In 1926 she and her husband, Frank Sheed, moved to London and founded Sheed & Ward. Words were the couple’s stock in trade. The amount and quality of what they wrote, spoke, translated and edited are a tribute to the contagious enthusiasm born of their felicitous pairing.[5] The couple have sometimes been cited as a modern Catholic example of street preaching. Sheed himself wrote a posthumous tribute to his wife under the title The Instructed Heart.

Reviews

[Mary Ellen Barringer · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent biography of an outstanding Christian woman.

[Camellia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning read! A real treasure. So glad I came across it.