A Rocking-Horse Catholic

By Caryll Houselander Caryll Houselander was nothing if not unconventional. In the estimation of Maisie Ward, her biographer and friend, it was this trait in particular, “the lack of plaster in her sainthood,” which so appealed to those who knew her or read her books. Published shortly after Houselander’s death at the age of fifty-three, A Rocking-Horse Catholic is a charming, at times disarming, exercise in autobio-graphy. With humility and humor, Houselander describes her childhood, its illnesses, and its earliest influences on her imagination, intellect, and awareness of God; her adolescent absence from the Church; the spiritual and material poverty of her early adulthood; and then her reconversion moments: a miraculous vision of the Mystical Body of Christ and an encounter with the Catholic Evidence Guild. Concluding the volume is “The Birth,” a poetic summary of her very life, whose ultimate task was “to see and to love Christ in man.” I was received into the Church when I was si