Ruadhán Jones
Dr Julia Meszaros Female Catholic authors tackled modern themes with an awareness of God, Ruadhán Jones hears
Catholics drawn to finding beauty in the written word will be delighted by the unearthing of some forgotten contributions to the Catholic literary revival in England in a new series.
The series on women writers from the early to mid-20th Century has been released by Catholic University of America press (CUA), under the editorship of Maynooth’s Dr Julia Meszaros and Cambridge academic Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson.
I started looking for a literature that had an awareness of God and was asking the questions that were so important for me”
The series – which includes Irish author Mary Beckett – showcases the skill with which these authors tackle “the big questions” about God and suffering, while situating them in modern life and literary styles, Dr Meszaros tells The Irish Catholic.
The series was partly born out of a desire to find literature that looked beyond the “nihilism and materialism characterising so many novels”, the Maynooth academic continues.
“I started looking for a literature that had an awareness of God and was asking the questions that were so important for me: what are we here for, how do we find God in our lives, why do we suffer. That kind of stuff, big questions.”
Dr Meszaros search led her to “the usual suspects”, including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor, but she was hungry for more.
“At some point I came across Caryl Houselander, her novel called The Drywood and found it deeply moving but realised it was out of print… At the same time a friend and colleague at Cambridge Bonnie Lander Johnson discovered the same thing about another Catholic writer called Alice Thomas Ellis. People who were alive in the 70s would probably know her but she was quite infamous then.”
Surprised
Drs Meszaros and Johnson started digging around and were surprised to discover that there were loads of Catholic writers, mostly women, who were successful in their day but forgotten today.
They approached CUA, who told them they had a potential series on their hands, and from suggestion came the Catholic Women Writers series.
The series can reestablish a balance in the canon of Catholic literature, Dr Meszaros hopes, “because it is true that most of us when we think of Catholic writers, we mostly have male names at the forefront of our minds. Flannery O’Connor is probably the big exception.
“Female authors are often tainted with the idea that they are all just angry Catholics, critical of the Church and its patriarchal structures… we did find that that’s not really true, they are a lot of other more happily Catholic female writers.”
Many of the authors they discovered form part of ‘The Catholic Literary Revival’, a period of renewed Catholic life and culture primarily in Britain and France the 19th and 20th Century.
Aside from the usual suspects already mentioned, the revival includes such luminaries as JRR Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc and non-Catholic writers like CS Lewis in England.
In England, this renewal had to do with Catholic emancipation and then the direction in which St John Henry Cardinal Newman took the Oxford Movement, Dr Meszaros explains.
“After Catholic emancipation, Catholics ventured into the public sphere including the arts and letters and there was a whole wave of conversions among intellectuals and artists who flocked to the Church in the early decades of the 20th Century,” she says.
While the revival is traditionally thought to have ended in the mid-20th Century, with a suggestion that the tail off coincided with Vatican II. Dr Meszaros contests this.
Literary output “probably did reach its climax in the first half of the 20th Century, but we would venture to say that it didn’t stop with Vatican II”, Dr Meszaros says.
“Actually if we look for it and want to find it, there is great Catholic literature being written all the way up until today. It’s just the way the publishing world developed in the second half of the century, it was harder for Catholic writers to be placed within the big commercial presses.
“Catholic literature is a little more hidden, but it does exist still and continued to exist throughout the 20th Century and especially yes if we put the women into the frame.”
The first novel released in the series is a prime example of a Catholic woman writer disentangling modern issues through the lens of ‘big questions’.
It’s very realist novel, it doesn’t embellish the realities of a postwar working-class parish”
The Drywood by best-selling English spiritual writer, poet and mystic Caryl Houselander traces the nine days of a novena as parishioners at a working class docklands parish in London pray to their recently deceased priest, who they think is a saint.
It’s unlikely material for what is, it could be argued, a ‘modernist’ novel, combining realism with a God’s-eye view of proceedings.
“Houselander takes us through the different members of that parish and their different, and in some ways desperate, disconnected, broken lives,” says Dr Meszaros.
“It’s very realist novel, it doesn’t embellish the realities of a postwar working-class parish… At the same time, she allows us to see them through God’s eyes.”
Techniques
That sounds a bit simplistic, Dr Meszaros admits, but she explains that Ms Houselander uses literary techniques “in such a way as allows us to actually see divine grace at work in these lives. It’s a very moving reflection on human suffering and how God is at work in the world.”
What makes the novel so clever is that it makes use of modernist techniques without falling into modern conclusions about human meaninglessness and the isolation of modern life, she continues.
“She really gives it a very Catholic spin,” says Dr Meszaros. “She gives us an equally modern and a Catholic perspective of modern life.
“Her novel is probably the most explicitly spiritual novel in the series, even pious perhaps to some extent. It is evident that she was a spiritual writer up until then. Unfortunately she died right after writing that novel, so she wasn’t able to develop her style as a writer of fiction.”
The novel looks at how we can live meaningful lives in relation to God in the midst of worldly chaos around us, and in the midst indeed of difficult family relationships”
There is one Irish author on the books for the series, that being Mary Beckett, from Belfast but Dublin based for most of her life. CUA are to publish her novel set during the Troubles in the North, Give Them Stones.
The Catholic novel didn’t take root in the same way as Ireland, with Dr Meszaros speculating that being a minority faith seemed to be “stimulating and inspiring” for English writers. But for Ireland, where Catholicism was the majority religion, it was harder to write Catholic fiction that was interesting and alive without being simply critical.
Mary Beckett’s novel tells the story of Martha Murtagh, a home baker who tries to support her family in the midst of the violence erupting around her.
Meaningful
“The novel looks at how we can live meaningful lives in relation to God in the midst of worldly chaos around us, and in the midst indeed of difficult family relationships,” says Dr Meszaros.
Despite being realistic, they are never negative or downcast and that’s what makes them so authentically Catholic, the Maynooth academic says.
“They are all very hope filled and that’s partly because they are very sacramental. The protagonist in Beckett’s novel – there’s a whole theme there that it’s through the breaking of the bread that grace comes to her and that she actually retains the divine, the ability to face what she needs to face.
“There’s an encounter with God with this mundane, practical, everyday task that she has to perform.”
For Dr Meszaros, the book’s message it still “so relevant” because resembles the simple lives the majority of us live.
“I find a lot of these women authors, having lived quite domestic lives themselves, are really good at exploring that theme – where is God in those ordinary, perhaps repetitive everyday lives and everyday labour that we need to perform.”
Though the novels first publication dates range the 1890s to the 1980s, they all maintain a relevance to our own day.
One theme the authors dwell on, which transcends time, is the cost of religious faith.
“Faith in none of these novels is an easy thing. It often comes at quite a high price for its protagonists,” says Dr Meszaros.
In that sense, they are realist, but they move beyond what would be typically considered a ‘realist’ style.
“They never present the faith as something unattractive but always as beautiful and enriching,” she says.
“The workings of grace in these characters’ lives always add a richness and complexity and beauty to these lives that couldn’t be found otherwise.”
The women authors respect that aspect of the genre, at the same time they ‘boldly try to depict faith and holiness as also being a human reality’”
Dr Meszaros suggests that the women authors, more so than their male counterparts, are willing to be explicit about the reality of faith in human lives.
“They are interested in exploring what faith looks like concretely and how it might inform human actions,” she continues.
“I think that’s a rare thing because the novel tends, because of its form, to want to depict difficulties and all that is hard and broken in human lives. It is easier to portray a bad character than a good one.”
But while the women authors respect that aspect of the genre, at the same time they “boldly try to depict faith and holiness as also being a human reality”.
Inspiring
“I think that’s quite bold and interesting and creative and inspiring. And that we need,” Dr Meszaros avers.
Another issue that the series addresses tangentially is the question of how Catholic can approach novels as writers and readers.
American Catholic author Flannery O’Connor frequently complained that Catholic readers – and readers in general – were not equipped by their education or culture to appreciate fiction as it was intended to be.
In a collection of her essays, the famous author recalls St Thomas Aquinas’ definition of art as a thing that is good in itself, saying that both as an artist and a reader you must have that holistic appreciation for a work of fiction.
Specifically as a Catholic writer or reader, you have to understand that a Catholic work of fiction is still primarily a work of fiction and stands the test of time based on if it is a good one or not.
This is of course reflected in the arts. The arts are not always deeply inspired by divine grace or by supernatural faith”
Dr Meszaros suggests that this was something that O’Connor was frustrated about, noting that “as Catholics we can be overly afraid of the world, especially where – which is usually the case – it is not faith filled”.
“This is of course reflected in the arts. The arts are not always deeply inspired by divine grace or by supernatural faith,” she says.
She wonders if a suspicion of the arts has grown among Catholics, adding that the writers of the CUA series “help to relieve us of that suspicion”.
“They are all women who lived in the world boldly and without fear and who depict the hidden presence of Christ in the world and therefore teach us to see that as far removed from God as the world may seem, or as empty of God, it actually isn’t that,” says Dr Meszaros.
Hope
“Literature in general and these books in particular can help us approach the world with love of and hope and help us discover God’s love in it and help us discover the beauty even of the brokenness of the world.
“Not just the beauty, but the particular theological or religious relevance of that. Because after all, God is particularly present in human suffering or in all that is seemingly removed from him.”
Dr Meszaros finishes, saying: “So we need to relearn to find Christ in our fellow human beings. I think a lot of these writers, and Flannery O’Connor is herself one of them, are really good at seeing that.
“And that is maybe something that artists in general can teach us. Because artists after all are people who are perceptive, who are good at observing things closely and seeing beyond appearances,” she concludes.