Evelyn Underhill

Evelyn Underhill — 1875–1941

Evelyn Underhill was an English writer, Anglo-Catholic spiritual author, poet, retreat leader, and one of the most influential early twentieth-century interpreters of Christian mysticism. Her best-known work, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911), helped make mysticism a respectable topic for modern intellectual and theological discussion. Britannica notes that her works, including Mysticism, The Mystic Way (1913), and Worship (1936), helped establish mystical theology as a serious modern discipline.

In Jeffery Kripal’s context, Underhill represents the scholar-practitioner whose writing on mysticism is not merely descriptive but devotional, aesthetic, and transformative. She is important because she bridges academic study, literary sensibility, Christian piety, and personal spiritual aspiration. Her work presents mysticism as a developmental movement of the soul toward union with God, but Kripal reads her also as an example of how the scholar’s desire, imagination, and interior life shape the study of mysticism.