Work for the Soul: Medievalism, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the Development of a Practical Spirituality in Evelyn Underhill’s Novel The Gray World

Summary

“God comes to the soul in His working clothes, and brings His tools with him” – that curious claim is one the scholar, mystic, and novelist Evelyn Underhill makes in House of the Soul, her 1929 guide to spirituality.So characteristic of Underhill’s spiritual thinking is such a claim that the iconog-rapher Suzanne Schleck chose it as the textual accompaniment to her icon of Underhill.That Underhill now has her own icon and even commemoration day within the Anglican church signifies the admiration her spiritual work has been accorded in recent decades. In her own time, the editor, writer, and fellow spiritual-seeker Arthur Edward Waite described her as a woman “whose repute as a mystical writer is at present second to none among living people.”T. S. Eliot, another famous contemporary, read her work Mysticism while a student at Harvard, later met her, and was indelibly shaped by that “intellectual, personal, and spiritual acquaintance.”

During the first half of the twentieth century, Underhill wrote prolifically about spiritual topics. And yet, despite recognition of her nonfictional spiritual writing by peers and recent scholars, Underhill’s fiction remains little read, and she still sits at the margins of scholarly study of early twentieth-century literature, although she wrote several spiritually inflected short stories, poems, and three novels during the first decade of the last century. Underhill’s reputation rightly rests on Mysticism (1911), her major study of that topic, and the plentiful spiritual writings that issued from that seminal work.However, her fiction, written in the decade prior to Mysticism, prefigures many of her most important spiritual insights and participates in a larger but underexplored movement of early twentieth-century writers (Waite, Arthur Machen, R. H. Benson, and Charles Williams, to name just a few) who test the boundaries of literary realism to explore significant spiritual and metaphysical questions, including the relationship between artistry and spirituality. In that respect, her fiction merits more scholarly attention.

Thus far, sustained scholarship about Underhill’s fiction has been limited to criticism embedded within biographies about her, with the exception of an unpublished dissertation by Justine Scott McCarthy exploring the psychological implications of her modernist aesthetic and a splendid recent essay by Carol Poston on Marian devotion in her fiction and other writings.