In Search of Community
Haley Stewart, Ed. Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know (Word on Fire, 2024)
An as-yet unpublished novel of mine once found its way into the hands of a literary agent for consideration. It’s about a young woman in a high-powered job who is unfaithful to her husband and makes quite a mess of her life. In a moment of crisis, she enters a church, where she has a transformative encounter with a Catholic priest.
I waited eagerly for the agent’s response. And while the answer was no, she kindly offered her feedback. Though she had wanted to like my book, she thought the pivotal scene with the priest was ridiculous; and by the end, she disliked the main character so much that she wished she’d get hit by a bus.
Needless to say, I went back to the drawing board. But for years after that, as I sent out my writing, I tried to keep my Catholic faith under the radar.
How wonderful, then, to discover that a vibrant culture of Catholic writers and publishers was already emerging right under my nose. My first real inkling came from a Facebook post promoting Katy Carl’s novel, As Earth Without Water (Carl’s essay on Rumer Godden is featured in Women of the Catholic Imagination). I was astonished and thrilled to read such a nuanced and beautiful story of an artist discerning a religious vocation. And as it turns out, there are many excellent works of fiction in this vein, both contemporary and classic. Some of them I knew, and some, I didn’t. For instance, did you know that Nobel-Prize winner Toni Morrison was a Catholic, and that her books can be read fruitfully in this light? How about Donna Tartt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch?
Women of the Catholic Imagination not only delineates the Catholicity of some of the writers we know; it also introduces many once well-known writers whose work still deserves to be read. According to Bonnie Lander Johnson, British novelist Alice Thomas Ellis’s “large and eccentric Gloucester Terrace household was well-known for its conflation of home life, writing, painting and publishing; in this convergence of activity, Ellis’s home has been compared to the Bloomsbury Group.” I’ve just finished the first book in Ellis’s Summerhouse Trilogy, and it’s great. Julia Meszaros has this to say about Caryll Houselander: “the artist [is] perhaps the last person left to witness to the beauty of doing something for its own sake, no matter the cost.” And I’d never heard of German writer Gertrud von le Fort, but Helena M. Tomko’s description of her accords with my own experience of writing fiction:
’Creative power can only be received,’ writes le Fort. She sees this as a feminine capacity and corrective to the masculine impulse toward ‘self-redemption’ and self-creation. Her understanding of Marian co-redemption is exemplary for men and women alike, who ‘must conceive the creative spirit in the sign of Mary, in humility and surrender, or he [and she] will not receive it at all.’
As you may have already gathered, Women of the Catholic Imagination is full of great writing. Dorian Speed introduces Scottish writer Muriel Spark like this:
Half a century before Jim Carrey walked off the set of The Truman Show or Will Farrell negotiated with the novelist pulling the strings of his life story in Stranger than Fiction, Caroline Rose (a Spark character) heard her own thoughts being typed out by an unseen author.
How cool is that? I recently attended a Catholic Literary Arts panel called “Writing While Catholic,” and Dorian Speed, who was one of the panelists, characterized good fiction as a place where wounded characters receive God’s grace through their interaction with others. This exactly describes the kind of stories I want to write and read.
In addition to the writers mentioned above, Women of the Catholic Imagination includes essays on Josephine Ward, Sigrid Undset, Flannery O’Connor, Caroline Gordon, and Alice McDermott. By my count, seven of the twelve writers featured are Catholic coverts and one is an English recusant, so there’s a wonderful diversity in their stories of faith. And beyond that, it’s refreshing to see how many of my favorite contemporary Catholic poets and fiction-writers are also very fine essayists and critics. Some of them, including Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, Katy Carl, and Joshua Hren, contributed essays to this book. Women of the Catholic Imagination is a great place to meet these writers, too.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 