Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhill
Born
6 December 1875(1875-12-06)
Wolverhampton, England
Died
15 June 1941 (aged 65)
England
Occupation Novelist, Writer, Mystic
Genres
Christian Mysticism, Spirituality
Notable
work(s)
Mysticism: A Study in Nature
and Development of Spiritual
Consciousness
Influences
Friedrich von Hügel, Rudolf
Christoph Eucken, Arthur
Machen, Henri Bergson, John of
the Cross
Influenced
C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, T.
S. Eliot
Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875 – June
15, 1941) was an English Anglo-Catholic
writer and pacifist known for her numerous
works on religion and spiritual practice, in
particular Christian mysticism.
In the English-speaking world, she was
one of the most widely read writers on such
matters in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury. No other book of its type—until the ap-
pearance in 1946 of Aldous Huxley’s The Per-
ennial Philosophy—met with success
to
match that of her best-known work, Mysti-
cism, published in 1911.[1]
Biography
Underhill was born in Wolverhampton. She
was a poet and novelist, as well as being a
pacifist and mystic. An only child, her early
mystical insights she described as "abrupt ex-
periences of the peaceful, undifferentiated
plane of reality—like the "still desert" of the
mystic—in which there was no multiplicity
nor need of explanation."[2] The meaning of
these experiences became a lifelong quest
and source of private angst, provoking her to
research and write.
Both her father and her husband were
writers (on the law), London barristers and
yachtsmen. She and her husband, Hubert
Stuart Moore, grew up together and were
married on July 3, 1907. The couple had no
children. She traveled regularly to the contin-
ent, primarily Switzerland, France and Italy
where she pursued her interests in art and
Catholicism, visiting numerous churches and
monasteries. Neither her husband (a Protest-
ant) nor her parents shared her interest in
spiritual matters.
Underhill was called simply "Mrs. Moore"
by many of her friends, but was not without
her detractors.