The epithets attached to Caryll Houselander in many retrospectives on her life and work are not always the most flattering. “Self-declared loser” and “misunderstood anomaly” are two; “a colorful, chain-smoking therapist who didn’t fit in anywhere” is another. And yet the reflections of this mid-century British artist, poet and spiritual writer remain for many a treasure trove of spiritual insight and honest reflections on faith. Jessica Mesman has called her “my favorite Catholic eccentric,” and Joyce Rupp wrote in U.S. Catholic in 2007 that “Caryll Houselander became a significant spiritual mentor for me in my 20s, when I found her book The Reed of God, about Mary and Christ. After that I read everything of hers I could find.”

Houselander was born in 1901 in Bath, England, to Anglican parents, though her mother became Roman Catholic when Caryll was 6 and raised her daughter as a Catholic. Caryll left the church as a teenager, and later descriptions suggest she was already suffering from severe anxiety and a possible personality disorder as well as physical health problems that would plague her all her life. 

Houselander’s spiritual seeking led her from her teenage years on to explore various expressions of faith including Buddhism, Judaism, Russian Orthodoxy and different Protestant denominations. She had her first mystical experience at 17, one of many that led her to a lifelong identification with the suffering Christ. In her book A Rocking-Horse Catholic (she chose the title because she did not consider herself a “cradle Catholic”), she wrote of one such experience on the train:

All sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too…all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come.

Houselander studied design and drawing at St. John’s Wood Art School and St. Martin’s School of Art in London while working odd jobs to support a somewhat bohemian lifestyle. Her talent for woodworking also resulted in some church commissions for statues and wooden reliefs. In 1922, she had a romantic relationship with the Russian-born secret agent Sidney Reilly, the famous “Ace of Spies” who was touted as “the greatest spy in history.” Reilly eventually married another woman, and Houselander remained single for the rest of her life. (Reilly was later executed by Soviet agents for espionage.)

Houselander returned to the Catholic Church in 1925. In A Rocking-Horse Catholic, she wrote:

For me, the greatest joy in being once again in full communion with the Catholic Church has been, and is now, the ever-growing reassurance given by the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, with its teaching that we are the Church, and that “Christ and His Church are one”—and that because Christ and His Church are one, the world’s sorrow, with which I have always been obsessed, and which is a common obsession in these tragic years, is only the shadow cast by the spread arms of the crucified King to shelter us until the morning of resurrection from the blaze of everlasting love.

Despite her focus on the world’s sorrow and the suffering Christ, Houselander would not qualify as a Jansenist or even a pessimist about human nature. In The Reed of God (by far her best-selling work), she wrote that “Although human beings smear everything they touch, they leave touches of beauty wherever they go, too: evidence that the senses receive their unique gifts of grace, wonder, joy, and gratitude because of the beauty that is their environment.”

Houselander’s career as an artist—including commissions as an interior decorator and a children’s art instructor—eventually expanded in the 1930s to include writing, particularly a number of essays for the Jesuit periodical The Messenger of the Sacred Heart. Her first book, This War Is the Passion, a collection of essays on Christ’s suffering amid the world’s suffering, was published by Sheed and Ward in 1941 and became a bestseller.

Despite having no formal training in psychology or therapy, Houselander volunteered throughout World War II as a counselor for children and adults suffering what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, and was often given patients for whom more conventional therapy had failed. In one-on-one sessions, she used music, art and informal conversation to treat her patients; the prominent British psychiatrist Eric Strauss credited Houselander with the ability to “love people back to life.” In fact, Houselander’s acquaintances over the years would attribute to her what sometimes appeared to be supernatural gifts of foresight and healing.

The Reed of God, a meditation on Mary in the context of the London Blitz, was published in 1944. Her novel The Dry Wood was published in 1947, and The Passion of the Infant Christ followed two years later. In 1951, her second and final novel, Guilt, was published. 

Houselander died of breast cancer in 1954 at the age of 53. After her death, Sheed and Ward published A Rocking-Horse Catholic and The Way of the Cross in 1955 and a collection of essays, The Risen Christ, in 1958. Though hardly the most prominent Catholic writer publishing in Great Britain at the time, Houselander was Sheed and Ward’s bestselling author for a number of years. She also wrote and designed children’s books; the contemporary children’s artist and writer Tomie dePaola credits her with inspiring his own vocation.

Her spiritual writings remained popular in the postwar years, and many of her themes—including the sanctity to be found in everyday life and the holiness of the lay vocation—found resonance in theological trends that emerged after the Second Vatican Council. Though some reviews dismissed her writing as theologically unsophisticated and childlike, she also had fans among the church’s intelligentsia. The theologian Bernard Lonergan, S.J., once praised her writing as “calm eyed, deft, exact,” and Msgr. Ronald Knox once said of her: “In all she wrote, there was a candour as of childhood: she seemed to see everything for the first time, and the driest or doctrinal considerations shone out like a restored picture when she had finished with it.” 

As a hard-drinking, smoking, eccentric prophet and mystic who seemed often to draw from her own spiritual wells, she also always existed slightly outside the realm of most religious writers and attracted spiritual seekers traveling in the same realms. In a 2005 review for America of Robert Ellsberg’s Blessed Among All Women (which featured Houselander among its subjects), Claire Schaeffer-Duffy wrote that “Caryll Houselander, artist and writer, entertains at her kitchen table those whom others found repulsive, because she realizes Christ is in everyone—there can be no outcasts.”

Houselander wrote in The Reed of God of her own image of Christ. In a 2021 essay for Commonweal, Joshua P. Hochschild described that image as “the model of willing suffering, and of compassion. Not coincidentally, also as one who taught with plain, well-conceived language: as an artist of speech”—in other words, someone with whom Houselander would clearly identify. Here are her words:

Christ was a poet, and all through His life the Child remains perfect in Him. It was the poet, the unworldly poet, who was King of the invisible kingdom; the priests and rulers could not understand that. The poets understand it, and they, too, are kings of the invisible kingdom, vassal kings of the Lord of Love, and their crowns are crowns of thorns indeed.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Novena That Carried Me,” by Asha Mirriam. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.