Robyn Wrigley-Carr teaches theology and spirituality at Alphacrucis, Sydney, Australia, and undertook her doctoral studies at St Andrews University, Scotland, taking as her topic Baron Fredrich von Hügel as spiritual director. In 2016, she visited Pleshey, the retreat house beloved of Evelyn Underhill, one of von Hügel’s directees. Much to her surprise, at the retreat house Wrigley-Carr stumbled across one of Underhill’s personal prayer books – handwritten and with her own bookbinding – which Underhill had used when leading retreats there, but which had later somehow got lost. Then another such book was unearthed, and Wrigley-Carr used these forgotten/neglected treasures to compile Evelyn Underhill’s Prayer Book (SPCK, 2018). The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill is the follow-up, and the first thing one might well remark about it is its own stylish cover, closely based on Underhill’s bookbinding – a high-quality production embossed with silver. It is a splendid herald of the riches to be found upon opening.

A first chapter focuses on von Hügel himself, a second on Underhill, a third narrates von Hügel’s special influence on Underhill, unfolding Wrigley-Carr’s doctoral research. Two final chapters then explore different aspects of Underhill’s self-designated ‘motherhood of souls’.

Of the two central figures, quite evidently Underhill is better known and more remembered, and yet this book brings something new to the study of her thought by its appealing focus on her ‘spiritual formation’, discussing in turn dimensions of her life, such as her ‘formation through Italian religious art’, ‘formation through marriage’, ‘…through the suffering of the war’, ‘…through ill health’. It is a striking way to appreciate her, and one I can imagine being useful as a model to invite analogous survey of their own personal experience by readers undertaking spiritual direction or similar reflection. Von Hügel is treated in a similar way, with his own modernist-leaning and ecumenical Roman Catholic convictions narrated in relation to the life he lived – not least in marrying an Anglican woman, who although she then became Catholic, had a religious background that gave him reasons to be sympathetic to the tradition Evelyn Underhill eventually made her own, despite continued struggle with it. The chapter that tracks von Hügel’s influence on Underhill through her meeting him for spiritual direction is particularly valuable for providing focus on aspects of her spirituality – and notably her experience of conversion and her way of articulating it – about which other books about her can tend to be more circumspect. It also brings notable illumination to the shifts that make her work so interesting – between her two magnum opuses Mysticism (1911) and Worship (1936), her turn to ‘traditional, institutional, sacramental religion’, and her increasingly christocentric devotion. It is clear reading Robyn Wrigley-Carr that Baron von Hügel was instrumental in instilling the emphases that Underhill found on the way to Worship, and to the incremental revisions she made to Mysticism through its subsequent editions (ditching earlier references to the occult and replacing them with those in line with her later views, for instance), and that took form through her many works between these two framing books, with The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (1920) evidently particularly appreciated by von Hügel. ‘You think you swallow things when they ought to swallow you’, Wrigley-Carr quotes von Hügel writing in one of his letters (p. 80) and this seems to be indicative of crucial changes Underhill made to her approach to divine mystery, as unembarrassed ‘adoration’ of ‘the Infinite’ became her hallmark. Wrigley-Carr’s research examining von Hügel’s influence on Underhill provides us with a new and attractive account of why Underhill testified that she ‘owe[d von Hügel her] whole spiritual life’.

The chapters on Underhill’s ‘motherhood of souls’ examine how what she learned from von Hügel she conveyed to others, highlighting her own work as spiritual director and then as retreat leader – the latter for which she remains remarkable as being the first woman from the Church of England to have this role – and so this book links back to Evelyn Underhill’s Prayer Book in a compelling way. Like its predecessor, Robyn Wrigley-Carr’s latest book shows forth the continuing vitality of Evelyn Underhill – a woman of her time, and of considerable privilege – both of which might be presumed to limit how she went on to be received, yet whose work has had an enduring reach to a wide range of succedents. The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill provides a very fine introduction/invitation to her and also will make rich and enjoyable reading for those fortunate to be already acquainted with Underhill’s writings.