Born in 1901, Caryll was of the generation that lived through two world wars, and by the time of the second she had already been marked by the first. In between the two were the days of wandering: art school, bohemianism (a tendency that would always remain with her), a love affair, self-torture as she desperately sought to find herself in her search for God. Living in London during the entire Second World War, she found herself at the heart of catastrophe in the form of nightly bombing, known as the Blitz. The suffering of human beings in war, which she equated with the suffering Body of Christ, led to her first book, This War is the Passion. Other books followed, all circling around the Christ-life. Her own life was cut short by cancer, about which she wrote, as if matter-of-factly making plans for the day ahead (she had long since found God--or, perhaps, in the way of the poet Francis Thompson, whom she admired, God had found her): "Well, if God wants me to die, it's all right."