Evelyn Underhill

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Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) was an English writer on mysticism whose 1911 book Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness became, for a generation of English readers, the standard introduction to its subject. Born in Wolverhampton and largely self-educated in the field, she came to the contemplative writers not as a churchwoman but as a literary outsider fascinated by what they reported — and she wrote about them with a seriousness that lifted “mysticism” out of vague usage and into something that could be studied.

The achievement of Mysticism was structural. Drawing on figures across the Western tradition — Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, the medieval and early-modern Christian contemplatives, with side-glances toward Sufi and Indian sources — she argued that the testimony of the mystics, however scattered, described a single recognizable movement of the self: an awakening, a purification, an illumination, a dark night, and a final union. She treated these accounts as reports of experience to be charted rather than doctrines to be argued, and the book’s authority rested on the breadth of its reading. It remains in print, and much later writing on the subject still works in its shadow.

Her own position shifted over time. Drawn early toward the broader currents of the period’s occult and esoteric revival, she moved gradually into the Church of England, and from the 1920s became one of its most sought-after retreat conductors and spiritual directors — among the first women invited to lead retreats for Anglican clergy. The later work is more pastoral than the early study, concerned less with mapping the contemplative life from outside than with guiding people through it. She held that the contemplative path was not the preserve of a gifted few but, in some measure, open to ordinary belief and practice.

Two of her smaller labors survive in the library here. In 1912 she produced a modern-English rendering of The Cloud of Unknowing, the fourteenth-century English treatise on contemplative prayer, with an introduction setting it in its tradition; in 1915 she contributed the introduction to Rabindranath Tagore’s English versions of the songs of Kabir, the fifteenth-century North Indian poet. Both reflect the comparative reach of her interest — the conviction, running through her work, that the contemplatives of different centuries and faiths were describing recognizably related country, even where their vocabularies and their gods were not the same.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · Songs of Kabir (Tagore & Underhill, 1915)

→ Related: Christian Mysticism · Gnosis · Neoplatonism