Lost Women Novelists

Some great ones mentioned here. I hope the authors are aware of all the living Catholic women novelists who currently belong to the Catholic Writers Guild and are in danger of becoming lost as well. From First Things:

Houselander viewed artistic production as a divine activity. No one, she said, “should ever make anything except in the spirit in which a woman bears a child, in the spirit in which Christ was formed in Mary’s womb, in the love with which God created the world.” Even so, among the lost women writers, Houselander was perhaps the most at home in the secular world in which she moved. English Catholics of her generation were often critical of modernity, but to her, “the modernist writers are not the contemptible egoists which they are too often supposed to be.” The Dry Wood is perhaps the most pious among the works of the Catholic literary revival, but in executing it Houselander drew upon the technical innovations developed by modernist literary peers and their experiments with time, place, and multivocalism.

Each chapter of The Dry Wood follows a different character in a London docklands parish. This narrative strategy was being deployed in the first decades of the twentieth century by modernist writers—Woolf, Joyce, Sommerfield—and was a reaction against the Protestant bourgeois novel of the nineteenth century, which focused on the individual moral arcs of characters linked by a network of relationships and overseen by an omniscient narrative voice. Twentieth-century literary modernism was critical of the bourgeois novel’s trust in individual consciousness; it was also critical of the omniscient voice and its providential orchestration of human relationships into a narratively harmonious order. In rejecting these conventions, modernist (often atheist) writers questioned literature’s investment in a totalizing moral, social, or religious order.

In The Dry Wood, Houselander was likewise reacting against the providentialism of the nineteenth-century Protestant novel, but unlike her atheist peers she did so by amplifying the mysterious operations of the divine presence. All her characters struggle on their own, separated from each other by strife and by the novel’s chapter arrangement, but their lives are ultimately drawn together into the final Mass, in an expertly constructed scene in which we see the great communal prayer of the Church depicted in all its earthly and heavenly dimensions. The novel’s structure reveals that no life is merely parallel. Even if the characters can’t see it, even if they continue to feel isolated, they are in fact part of one unified vision held in the eye of the omniscient maker.

The novels of Waugh and Greene often focus on the solitary figure of a priest or layman in spiritual combat with the world around him. By contrast, the lost novels of Catholic women are usually situated in families and parishes and in the institutional communities in which the writers themselves first encountered the faith: schools, convents, or convent schools. Rumer Godden wrote three convent novels, unsentimental depictions of communal religious life that nonetheless describe that life as a source of human fulfillment and divine grace for the women who choose it. Kate O’Brien’s Land of Spices (1941), set in an Irish convent school, follows the spiritual development of the prioress and the youngest student: a pair of women at either end of life who are bound to each other as mutual agents of grace. (Read more.)

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