Reframing Charles Williams: Modernist Doubt and the Crisis of World War in All Hallows' Eve

Critics have done little to contextualize the Inkling Charles Williams within the tumultuous period of the mid-twentieth century, ignoring his connections to high modernism and treating him as a minor writer of fantasy fiction. The 2002 publication of his letters to his wife, however, reveal the danger of divorcing him from his historical moment and permit a more nuanced biographical contextualization. Neither altogether incredible thrillers, nor mere defenses of his extraordinary Christianity, all of his novels represent an odd marriage of the supernatural and the realistic, the latter informed by the terrible uncertainty of the early- to mid-twentieth century. His last novel, All Hallows' Eve (1945), is best understood in the context of profound angst provoked by the war: here we see Williams in his modernist guise, using literature as a direct and urgent response to the century's second climacteric.