Böcker i Catholic Women Writers-serien

"Caryll Houselander (deceased) is a woman author featured in the Catholic Women Series, which re-publishes books by previously well-known Catholic women writers that have fallen out of print. The Dry Wood is a novel set in a post-war London Docklands parish. A story about a motley group of souls mourning the loss of their parish priest. This novel is a profound meditation on the purpose of human suffering"--

A novel about the human need for purpose, for a truth by which to live and for which to die. It is a novel about faith and idolatry, love and death, freedom and bondage, nature and grace. Put another way, it is about how human beings cannot escape the great challenge of salvation, of breaking free from false, man made gods.

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism's greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history--except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world. First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel's younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisitedthe human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward's novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

Gathered here for the first time are the stories of Enid Dinnis, who lived and wrote in London throughout the first half of the 20th century. Few in London's literary scene knew that Dinnis was a nun but she lived most of her life in a small convent in Wimbledon with other well-known figures from the period, including Maud Petre. Dinnis wrote Catholic stories for readers of all ages. She is one of the finest lost authors of the Catholic Literary Revival. Dinnis's intervention in the short story genre is considerable. She weaves together fairy tale, myth, Catholic mysticism, epiphanic dialogue and everyday characterization to produce stories that are both simple and complex, both light-hearted and profound. Always concerned with 'the wonderful resourcefulness of the love of God', her stories proclaim the presence and workings of divine grace in the everyday lives of all people--old and young, sceptics and seekers, farmers and priests. Dinnis's stories show that God's love is the answer to all human struggles and quests. They illustrate what it means to receive love--human and divine--and to pass it on. Her work is filled with visions and confessions, miracles and conversions--but it is never overly pious or saccharine. Her characters are real people experiencing the truths proclaimed by the Catholic faith, which is always as marvelous as it is every-day. Enid Dinnis's stories reenchant the post-enlightenment world along Catholic lines. Her stories put the supernatural firmly back into the world in a way more needed than ever.