Charles Williams (British writer)
| Charles Williams | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | Charles Walter Stansby Williams 20 September 1886 London, England |
| Died | 15 May 1945 (aged 58) Oxford, England |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | English |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Notable works |
War in Heaven The Place of the Lion The Greater Trumps Descent into Hell |
| Spouse | Florence Conway |
Charles Walter Stansby Williams (20 September 1886 – 15 May 1945) was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian, literary critic, and member of the Inklings.
Williams was born in London in 1886, the only son of (Richard) Walter Stansby Williams (1848–1929), a journalist and foreign business correspondent for an importing firm, writing in French and German, who was a 'regular and valued' contributor of verse, stories and articles to many popular magazines, and his wife Mary (née Wall, the sister of the ecclesiologist and historian J. Charles Wall), a former milliner, of Islington. He had one sister, Edith, born in 1889. The Williams family lived in 'shabby-genteel' circumstances, owing to Walter's increasing blindness and the decline of the firm by which he was employed, in Holloway.
Educated at St Albans School, Hertfordshire, Williams was awarded a scholarship to University College London, but he left school in 1904 without attempting to gain a degree due to an inability to pay tuition fees.
No longer in college, Williams began work in 1904 in a Methodist bookroom. He was hired by the Oxford University Press (OUP) as a proofreading assistant in 1908 and quickly climbed to the position of editor. He continued to work at the OUP in various positions of increasing responsibility until his death in 1945. One of his greatest editorial achievements was the publication of the first major English-language edition of the works of Søren Kierkegaard.
Although chiefly remembered as a novelist, Williams also published poetry, works of literary criticism, theology, drama, history, biography, and a voluminous number of book reviews. Some of his best known novels are War in Heaven (1930), Descent into Hell (1937), and All Hallows' Eve (1945).T. S. Eliot, who wrote an introduction for the last of these, described Williams's novels as "supernatural thrillers" because they explore the sacramental intersection of the physical with the spiritual while also examining the ways in which power, even spiritual power, can corrupt as well as sanctify. All of Williams's fantasies, unlike those of J. R. R. Tolkien and most of those of C. S. Lewis, are set in the contemporary world. Williams has been described by Colin Manlove as one of the three main writers of "Christian fantasy" in the twentieth century (the other two being C.S. Lewis and T. F. Powys). More recent writers of fantasy novels with contemporary settings, notably Tim Powers, cite Williams as a model and inspiration. W. H. Auden, one of Williams's greatest admirers, reportedly re-read Williams's extraordinary and highly unconventional history of the church, The Descent of the Dove (1939), every year. Williams's study of Dante entitled The Figure of Beatrice (1944) was very highly regarded at its time of publication and continues to be consulted by Dante scholars today. His work inspired Dorothy L. Sayers to undertake her translation of The Divine Comedy. Williams, however, regarded his most important work to be his extremely dense and complex Arthurian poetry, of which two books were published, Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), and more remained unfinished at his death. Some of Williams' essays were collected and published posthumously in Image of the City and Other Essays (1958), edited by Anne Ridler.
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