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Enid Maud Dinnis (1873–1942) was an English journalist, author, and poet of the Catholic Literary Revival.

Biography

Born May 23,1873 in East London to an Anglican priest, Francis Henry Dinnis, and his wife Ann, she spent her early years at the vicarage of St. Stephen’s in Stepney in London’s East End. Dinnis attended a convent school in Belgium, and it was there that she was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the Ursaline Convent in Thildonck in 1897. “When her father retired from his parish sometime after 1911, Dinnis returned to London and the family lived together in Putney, supported in part by income from Dinnis’s writing.” In 1918, she joined a ‘hidden’ order of women religious, the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, whose members wore secular clothes and lived alone, with their families, or in communal houses. For the last decades of her life, she was Superior of the DHM house in Wimbledon. She died at Wimbledon on November 24, 1942.

In The Book of Catholic Authors, First Series: Informal Self-Portraits of Famous Modern Catholic Writers (1942) Dinnis offered her reflections on her literary vocation to which the editor added the note: “Miss Dinnis (in private life, Mrs. William Cassell) lives in London.” Though one may have occurred at some point, no reliable evidence of any marriage has been found. “Mrs. William Cassell” may have been a novel use of a pseudonym as a red herring to help keep her religious vocation private.

Literary Life

“Dinnis moved widely in the London literary world before and during the wars. She wrote copiously in prose and verse, finding a distinctive Catholic voice and devising a particular style that combined Catholic mysticism and miracle with fairy tales and ordinary contemporary life.”

“Mystery stories are popular, and surely it is something for an author to be able to present a mystery story which keeps its Mystery after the last page has been read? Is that not going one better than the thriller? The supernatural is ever present with us. None of my stories ever really happened, but I maintain that each one of them could have happened.”

Dinnis and illustrator Florence Harrison

Dinnis maintained a deep, influential friendship with the artist Florence Harrison, who illustrated many of her stories – notably those for the American Catholic monthly review The Sign – and her novels. What motivated Harrison’s conversion to Catholicism is unknown, but it may have been the result of her friendship with Dinnis, who she met in Belgium. Harrison never married. She stopped publishing her art after Dinnis's death in 1942 and lived quietly thereafter until her own death in 1955.

Bibliography

In addition to the novels and the collections of poems and short stories listed below, early in her career Enid Dinnis wrote satirical articles for such periodicals as Punch and, from 1924 through 1942, dozens of short stories for The Sign. Her first “printed-and-paid-for article” – dealing with the names of the streets in the old historic city of London – appeared in 1897. Her final story, entitled “Dinah’s Fairy Godmother”, was discovered after her death. It was published – illustrated by Florence Harrison – in the July 1943 issue of The Sign.

The Books of Enid Dinnis

• The Anchorhold, A Divine Comedy. Herder, 1923.
• Bess of Cobb’s Hall, The Holy Maid of Kent. Bruce, 1940.
• By Fancy’s Footpath. Herder, 1932.
• The Curtain Rises. Herder, 1937.
• Emily Hickey, Poet, Essayist and Pilgrim; A Memoir. London, Harding and More, 1927.
• Father Damien, The Apostle of the Lepers. London, Catholic Truth Society (In Miscellanea Theologica, v 66, no 9).
• God’s Fairy Tales. Herder, 1916.
• In Merlac’s Mirror. Herder, 1935.
• Meadowsweet and Thyme. Herder, 1922.
• Mr. Coleman, Gent. Herder, 1930.
• Mystics All. Herder, 1918.
• Once Upon Eternity. Herder, 1922.
• Out of the Everywhere. Herder, 1931.
• Pauline Marie Jaricot. London, Catholic Truth Society, 1922.
• A Scallop Shell of Quiet, Poems by Enid Dinnis, Helen Douglas-Irvine, Gertrude Vaughan, Ruth Young. Oxford, B.H. Blackwell, 1917.
• “St. Paula.” (In Williamson, Claude C. H., ed., Great Catholics. London, Nicholson and Watson, 1928, 14-24.)
• The Road to Somewhere. Herder, 1928.
• (ed.) Saint Dismas and Other Legends in Verse, by E.H. London, Harding and More, n. d.
• The Shepherd of Weepingwold. London and Edinburgh, Sands, 1929.
• The Three Roses. Herder, 1926.
• Travellers’ Tales. Herder, 1927.
• (ed.) True Devotion to the Passion, by Bl. Battista Varani. Kenedy, 1924.
• Undercross. Herder, 1943.

Articles of Enid Dinnis

• “An Appreciation” Annals of the Propagation of the Faith: A Periodical Collection of Letters from the Bishop and Missionaries Engaged in, and News from, Catholic Foreign Missions 91/527:17-18, 1929.
• “An Attainder on Dame Elizabeth Barton, O.S.B.” Thought 5:357-73, 1930.
• “Chelsea to Tower Hill.” America 53:486-87, 1935.
• “Coincidence and Sheer Coincidence.” America 41:177-78, 1929.
• “The Devotional Poems of Emily Hickey.” Month 142:413-20, 1923.
• “Do We Want Henry VI?” America 36:375-77, 1927.
• “Emily Hickey, In Memoriam.” Catholic World 120:732-6, 1925.
• “Ghostly Omen as Historians.” Commonweal 9:569-70, 1929.
• “How We ‘Emancipated’.” America 42:81-82, 1929.
• “Juliana’s Bread.” Catholic World 116:605-19, 1923.
• “Margery Kempe and Husband John.” America 60:187-88, 1938.
• “Margery Kempe of Lynne.” Thought 15:84-96, 1940.
• “The Mass in Phoenix Park.” America 31:392-93, 1929.
• “Modern Biographies Make Over Our Saints.” America 57:331-32, 1937.
• “A Poet Passes.” Month 144:301-7, 1924.
• “The Pope’s Men; Nine English Martyrs.” Catholic Truth Society, n. d.
• “Rationalizing the Saints.” America 35:272-73, 1926.
• “Saint Edward the Confessor.” Catholic Truth Society, n. d.
• “The Supernatural in Fiction.” America 34:405-6, 1926.
• “When Christ Came Back to Waverly.” America 40-206-7, 1928.

Articles on the work of Enid Dinnis

• “Enid Dinnis.” In The Book of Catholic Authors, First Series. Detroit, Walter Romig, 1942, 58-60.
• Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, Introduction in Ennid Dinnis, The Complete Short Stories, Volume One. Catholic University of America Press, 2024.
• Enid Dinnis, “The Supernatural in Fiction”. In Fiction by its Makers, by Francis Xavier Talbot, S.J. New York, The America Press, 1928.
• Francis X. Talbot, S.J., “Faith in Fiction”. America 32:352-54, 1925.
• Francis X. Talbot, S.J., “The World of Enid Dinnis”. America 38:115-16, 1927.
• Louise Wheaton, “The Books of Enid Dinnis”. America 29:64-65, 1923.

Miscellaneous

• John Howe, “Women in the Golden Age of Illustration: Florence Harrison”, /www.john-howe.com/blog/the-defining-of-dreams/, 2011.
• Frances Stonor Saunders, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. New York, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2010.
• Includes 19 citations of correspondence between Enid Dinnis and her friend Violet Gibson, who attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini in Rome in 1926.

Notes

 1. Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, p. XV
 2. “Enid Dinnis.”,  p. 58
 3. Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, p. XVI
 4. ibid., p. XVII
 5. “Enid Dinnis.”,  p. 60
 6. Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, back cover
 7. “Enid Dinnis.”,  p. 60
 8. ibid., p. 58
 9. John Howe