In a beautifully bound book that invites readers to better know the writing of Catholic women, editor Haley Stewart notes the “sacramental view” informing the work of the novelists included in Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know. 

“These writers’ imaginations have been formed by the sacred, and the worlds of their stories are permeated with grace — sometimes explicit grace, sometimes hidden grace,” Stewart writes in the book’s introduction.

The experience of reading the essays in this book is akin to being introduced to a friend. Each essayist pulls from his or her research, interest and love for a particular woman writer, and brings out thematic threads that weave their way through her work. Some of the novelists explored in this book are familiar like Flannery O’Connor, some less so. Readers can expect to learn names of writers they hadn’t heard of before and new aspects about the writing of more familiar names.

What sets this book apart is the suggested reading list that can be found at the end of each essay. This book would make just as valuable a resource in a college literature class as it would for individual reading. For students, the essays model how to examine individual works of literature, while also being incredibly readable. Readers are likely to walk away from this book with a list of books they’d like to explore.   

Approaching a book like Women of the Catholic Imagination allows readers a taste of the work of each novelist, to whet the appetite for a future meal — a writer’s novel or oeuvre. Therefore, this review can only touch upon a few tidbits particularly of note for this writer. 

The attention given to two English translations of Norwegian author Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, is skillfully rendered in Amy Fahey’s essay, “Sigrid Undset: Novelist of Mercy.” Utilizing many textual examples from the novel, she invites us to observe how the experience of reading is affected by differences between the 1923 and 1997 translations. She also notes the richness of Undset’s work for the modern reader: “In Undset’s life and writings, the scandal of the cross becomes the only cure for the scandal of self-love.”

The cross is a theme that translates across many of these essays.

Women of the Catholic Imagination is bookended by a concluding essay by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera entitled, “The Hidden Secret of Catholic Literature.” A literature informed by Catholic faith is not one made up of (or, as Stewart notes, written by) saintly people who walk without stumbling toward God. “The only way to understand Christian literature,” Fenollera says, “is to assume that we will always find more sinners than saints in it and that its pages must confer an inescapable place to the human experiences of pain, the fall, and sin — and especially, of grace.” 

Each of the Catholic novelists — which also include Josephine Ward, Caryll Houselander, Rumer Godden and Alice McDermott, among others — have shaped stories that call to readers. 

As Stewart says in her introduction, “The very best books call us out of our comfort zones to conversion.” Informed by Catholicism, these novelists’ works may challenge, comfort or open up new ways of seeing the world and ourselves. To be more deeply introduced to these writers, through the lens of their faith, is certainly a privilege.    

This post has been updated.