Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Humphrey Carpenter
Owen Barfield: Biographical Note
from The Inklings

owen barfiEld

Born in 1898, the son of a London solicitor. His parents were "free-thinkers" and (wrote Lewis in Surprised by Joy) "he had hardly heard of Christianity itself until he went to school." After attending Highgate School he served in the Royal Engineers, 1917-19, and then read English at Wadham College, Oxford, where he got a First Class. He later took a B. Litt. After leaving Oxford, Barfield worked for seven years as a freelance writer, holding various appointments on editorial staffs and contributing to the New Statesman, London Mercury, and other journals. In about 1922 he became interested in the teachings of Rudolf Steincr, and, together with Lewis's friend Cecil Harwood,¹ joined the Anthroposophical Society. His book Poetic Diction, which in its original form was his B. Litt. thesis, was published in 1928. In 1931 lack of sufficient income from writing (he now had a wife and children to support) made him enter his father's legal firm while studying for the B.C.L. at Oxford. The work was hard and demanding, and his literary output became small until, nearly thirty years later, a gradual retirement from legal practice allowed him to write a number of books which are largely concerned with Anthroposophy: Saving the Appearances(1957), Worlds Apart (1963), and Unancestral Voice (1965), as well as Speaker's Meaning (1967) and What Coleridge Thought (1971). Interest in these books was aroused in several American universities, and Barfield has made a number of visits to the United States to give lectures. He lives in Kent.

1 Harwood was, of course, Barfield's friend since they were both students together at Highgate School.