“By the Voice of the Servant of the Lord”: Blake’s New Jerusalem and Swedenborgianism in the Work of Sheila Kaye-Smith

A popular novelist during the interwar period, Sheila Kaye-Smith was best known for her stories of rural lives that were clearly influenced by the work of Thomas Hardy, as well as her conversion to Catholicism in later years. In her posthumous autobiography, All the Books of My Life, Kaye-Smith also revealed that William Blake was the third of her “lifelong companions” (along with George Borrow and Jane Austen), and the profound influence he had on her thought and spiritual development is shown in an essay written by her when she was still at, or had shortly left, school. William Blake & The New Jerusalem shows the young author working through the polarities of philosophy and poetics, heaven and hell through the interactions of Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg, and is an example of the minute particulars in the study of Blake’s reception as it repeats errors introduced into popular conceptions of Blake by W.B. Yeats.