The Catholic Literary Revival in England, Houselander, and Kaye-Smith, et al.

The Catholic University of America Press is publishing the "Catholic Women Writers" series, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros. From the CUA Press blog:

The novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham 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 and convents. Almost wholly unrecognized by scholarship on the Catholic novel are the frequent depictions of female religious life. The women writers of the Catholic Literary Revival were in their own time well-known and well-read, with no shortage of best-selling authors among their ranks. Most predated and greatly influenced Waugh and Greene. They wrote from a more diverse range of social and political positions than Waugh and Greene, and were often more radical in their use of ninetheenth- and twenthieth-century literary innovations. Their works are set in locations male writers never considered, and they often posed very different questions about how a person can find their way in a fallen world. . . .

After introducing the first two volumes in the series and discussing the achievements of their authors (Caryll Houselander and Sheila Kaye-Smith), "The Lost Women of the Catholic Literary Revival" post continues:

This all leads back to the big question: if Houselander’s work was daring and experimental as the literary scholars craved, and Kaye-Smith’s works resonated with the masses, how did they and other women writers of the Catholic Literary Revival fall out of circulation in both critical and commercial circles, in indeed they were ever there to begin with? We can point to changes in the commercial publishing world after World War II, changes within the Church itself, and redefinitions of the literary canon in University departments in the last decades of the twentieth 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 out of print for so long.

Please read the rest there.

Cluny Media, however, have published Caryll Houselander novel, The Dry Wood, the same one the series begins with, and the Maisie Ward biography of her already, still in preparation in the CUA Press series. And I know that I'm just an independent author with one book to her name, but I included Sheila Kaye-Smith in my book Supremacy and Survival in the litany of 20th century converts. Virago Press published some of her novels in the 1980's, although they're no longer in their catalog, and Country Books published a biography, The Shining Cord. So maybe these authors--certainly Caryll Houselander's spiritual writings have been in print for quite some time--aren't as forgotten as the post claims! Nevertheless, it's important to have a major press sponsoring a uniform edition of these works.

And when a friend asked about my birthday/Christmas wish list, I told her about Kaye-Smith's The End of the House of Alard! I wonder if the "House of Alard" is about the same family as Kate Alard's, the heroine of Superstition Corner?