The Dry Wood
New York: Sheed & Ward, 1947. First edition. Octavo, original pale gray cloth, original pictorial dust jacket. Unclipped dust jacket minor wear at corners, mild creasing to upper edges, some loss at top of the spine. Very good indeed. Item #1843
"THERE IS A LIKENESS, EVEN IN OUTWARD THINGS, BETWEEN UNCONQUERABLE LIFE IN BROKEN HUMANITY, AND THAT IN CHRIST'S BODY"
First edition of The Dry Wood—the first and only published novel by Caryll Houselander—"one of the great English mystics of the twentieth century" (Alice Curtayne). Complete as published with the original illustrated dust jacket.
"A poet with a strong sense of the communion of saints" (Gerard Meath), the English Catholic spiritual writer was one of Sheed and Ward's most popular authors, with three books already published (The Flowering Tree is advertised on the back panel of the dust jacket). Houselander writes of an East End London parish seeking miraculous intercession after the death of their priest for the recovery of a small child. With a title page epigraph taken from Luke 23:31 ("For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?"), Houselander's novel presents an East End parish as "a cross section of the life of the Church" (Gerard Meath). For another contemporary reviewer, The Dry Wood, "basically the story of the death of a saintly London priest and the united faith of his followers that he will save a dying child—is a poet's first novel. And it is not necessary to read very far to realize that Caryll Houselander is perhaps a poet 'rather than' a novelist" (Eunice Glenn). Gerard Meath. The Life of the Spirit (December 1947); Eunice Glenn. As On a Darkling Plain. The Sewanee Review (Spring 1948).
Price: $200.00