The Lost Word: A Spiritual Journey

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) 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 century. No other book of its type - until the appearance in 1946 of Aldous Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy" - met with success to match that of her best-known work, "Mysticism," published in 1911. Before undertaking many of her better known expository works on mysticism, she first published a small book of satirical poems on legal dilemmas, "The Bar-Lamb's Ballad Book," which received a favorable welcome. Underhill then wrote three highly unconventional though profoundly spiritual novels, "The Grey World" (1904), "The Lost Word" (1907), and "The Column of Dust" (1909).