The Making of a Mystic: New and Selected Letters of Evelyn Underhill

The Making of a Mystic: New and Selected Letters of Evelyn Underhill. Edited by Carol Poston. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2010, Pp. 360. $75.00.)

Evelyn Underhill is the best-known Anglican authority on mysticism, but her remarkable gifts as a writer are evident in this collection of letters. The first was written in 1888, when Underhill was twelve; the last was mailed a week before her death in 1942 at the age of 65. Scholars have long been familiar with Charles Williams' 1943 edition of Underbill's letters. Carol Poston, professor emerita of English at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, claims that her edition gives nearly three hundred new letters as well as complete texts of letters newly edited from the original manuscripts. Poston provides very helpful introductions to each chronological group of letters, highlighting external events in Underbill's...