Then May the Senses Fall

Evelyn Underhill’s Forgotten Fiction

Edited by William Gillard and Robert Stauffer

Paperback
9781958972953
US $22.99
eBook available
October 2025

A revered priest’s horrifying metaphysical secret that is revealed only after his death. A sculptor’s obsessive desire to craft the horrific face that haunts his dreams and drives him to madness. A journey upriver to an unspoiled realm whose denizens revile anything tainted by humans. The sole survivor of an island shipwreck and the terrifying ancient being he confronts.

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) is best known for her groundbreaking and accessible studies on Christian mysticism: over forty books and hundreds of articles and lectures on spiritual practices, including her most famous work, Mysticism (1911). Yet even the most avid Underhill reader does not know that she spent her youth writing some seriously weird fiction: supernatural short stories that H.P. Lovecraft might have enjoyed. Here for the first time is a collection of short stories, poetry, and an essay written by the foremost Christian mystic of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Underhill’s brief fiction career represents an important step in her mystical and spiritual development. Understand these stories and you go a long way toward understanding how Underhill became the transformational thinker and mystic the world knows her to be.

The English Anglo-Catholic author Evelyn Underhill is best known for her groundbreaking and accessible studies on Christian mysticism including her most famous work, Mysticism (1911), which is still read widely around the world. She resided in London and died in 1941.

Editors William Gillard and Robert Stauffer are co-authors of Speculative Modernism: How Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conceived the Twentieth Century (McFarland, 2021), a scholarly study of science fiction, horror, and fantasy during the literary Modernist era. Gillard (PhD, MFA) is an award-winning professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and author of books on literary Modernism and speculative fiction, a novel, a short story collection, and volumes of poetry. Stauffer (PhD) is an associate professor of English at Dominican University New York who specializes in medieval and Renaissance literature, and has also published science-fiction short stories.

“I think her work is essential for anyone seeking an authentic Christian mysticism that refuses to be confined by its historical boundary of the cloister.” —Carl McColman, author of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism