Charles Williams

Charles Walter Stansby Williams (September 20, 1886 – May 15, 1945), educated at St Albans School, Hertfordshire and University College, London, he was a staff editor at the Oxford University Press, at the London offices from 1908 until 1939 and afterwards, due to World War II evacuations, at Oxford. In that capacity, he is best known for publishing the first major English-language edition of the works of Søren Kierkegaard.

Williams is better remembered as a writer, of poetry, novels, drama, criticism, and biographies. His best known works are his extremely dense and complex Arthurian poetry (in two books, Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars), and his seven novels of Christian mysticism, in which intense spiritual matters infuse their way into the modern world. Yet they are not horror, but fantasy or supernatural fiction. Modern writers of fantasy with contemporary settings, notably Tim Powers, cite Williams as a model and inspiration.

Williams gathered many followers and disciples during his lifetime. He was for a period a member of the Salvator Mundi Temple of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He met fellow Anglican Evelyn Underhill (who was also affiliated with the Golden Dawn) in 1937 and was later to write the introduction to her published Letters in 1943.

Some time after 1938 with the completion of Williams' novel The Place of the Lion, he was sending a letter of congratulation to C. S. Lewis on the latter's Allegory of Love. By coincidence, Lewis was also sending Williams' a letter congratulating him on The Place of the Lion and the letters crossed in the post. As a result, the two became good friends and the event was followed by his membership in The Inklings, a literary discussion group of which J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were also a part that met weekly at The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford (better known by its nickname "The Bird and Baby").

Williams's novels are:

He also wrote several non-fiction works of theology:

Works

External links

See also: Charles Williams, 1886, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1937, 1945, Anne Ridler, C. S. Lewis