Robyn Wrigley-Carr wrote her doctoral thesis in the Divinity School, St Andrews University, having discovered there the primary location of books and other materials relating to Friedrich von Hügel, focusing on his work as a ‘spiritual director’. It was inevitable that she would also develop a focus on the work of Evelyn Underhill who, as it happened, was to discover a personal friend in Lucy Menzies. The latter became Evelyn Underhill’s collaborator as writer, researcher and co-‘retreat director’ from her family domestic base in St Andrews, where she became a significant member of the congregation of All Saints Church. She is commemorated there by a memorial tablet recording her death in 1954, the year in which she was awarded an Honorary DD by the University of St Andrews. Evelyn Underhill herself had been awarded an Honorary DD by the University of Aberdeen in 1938, on the very eve of a disastrous war in Europe, and just three years before she died in 1941 – a grievous loss to Lucy Menzies, with whom she had shared so much, not least in establishing ‘retreats’ at Pleshey in the Chelmsford Diocese from 1924 onwards (8). It is all too easy to overlook the importance of what they achieved together given the long-standing discomfort in Christian institutions about women as authoritative teachers and guides, notwithstanding the unambiguous evidence provided by the publication of Evelyn’s major work on Mysticism in 1911, never out of print in its various editions and revisions. Offering her gifts to the Church of England as a ‘retreat director’ was one very effective way of introducing Evelyn’s appreciation of the ‘spirituality’ of both the Christian and to some extent, the non-Christian traditions of prayer, to those possibly unacquainted with the major publication of 1911 and to a whole series of shorter books she published subsequently.

In giving retreats twice a year at Pleshey and in a group of other diocesan houses, Evelyn found in Lucy Menzies a companion with whom she could share some of the work involved, with Evelyn primarily focused on gathering her resources both in the prayers she offered to those gathered for retreats, and for the six retreat addresses she published. Thanks to Dr Wrigley-Carr, her prayers can now be reread in tandem with the fortuitous rediscovery of not one but two of Evelyn’s handwritten Prayer Books. These have been combined into one publication, beautifully presented in a volume of a hand-held size, and a jacket which replicates the binding of one of the rediscovered books, the binding very probably the personal handiwork of Evelyn herself.

Dr Wrigley-Carr rightly focuses on the importance of von Hügel in steering Evelyn into overt identification as a member of the Church of England, the church of her baptism, her confirmation (a somewhat miserable episode which had become the responsibility of the boarding school in which she had spent some of her adolescent years) and her marriage, but there were also some family connections which may have been of importance to her, and which are easily overlooked. One uncle was a ‘High Church’ priest in Liverpool, and a cousin, Francis, a priest at St Albans, Birmingham, who was to become Bishop of Bath and Wells, whose own books on prayer published between the two World Wars reveal him as being a ‘Catholic Modernist’ within the Church of England. Like Evelyn, he was anything but fearful of attending to new sources of knowledge whilst attending to and reinterpreting the tradition he inhabited. He at least must have represented one possibility of association and identification for Evelyn herself. In addition, although nowadays little read, Evelyn’s three novels – written before she turned to the writing of Mysticism – reveal her extensive sympathies for liturgical worship and its resources, some of which in any case she had experienced not only in visits to Roman Catholic churches but to a range of ‘Orthodox’ traditions both in London, and, crucially, in travelling in mainland Europe over many years.

Dr Wrigley-Carr has not only marshalled Evelyn’s two prayer books into one coherent whole, but has provided ‘Author biographies and liturgical sources’ (131-32) in the order in which their authors appear in her edition of the prayers, but also some notes on the ‘Church Liturgies’ on which Evelyn drew – one of the most exemplary and ecumenical members of the Church of England in her day, the fruits of which were to appear in her last major work on Worship (1936). This edition of her prayers is not, however, organized along the pattern of the liturgical year, given its origins in resources for conducting retreats. Its users will find their own ways of appropriating its contents, and may come across some surprises. My own was the heart-breaking prayer for ‘Evacuated Children’ (101), easily transcribed into a prayer for the unaccompanied children seeking refuge away from the horrors of present-day conflicts and disasters, so shamefully vulnerable to exploitation, bureaucratic delays and racist indifference. A voice from the past, certainly, but one still to hear.