Sheldon Vanauken - Later Life

Later Life

Many years after Davy's death, Vanauken went looking for the daughter Davy had given up for adoption as a young girl. The story of his search, their 1988 meeting, and how it affected his beliefs is related in The Little Lost Marion and Other Mercies, which was written shortly before his death. "Marion", who had been given another name by her adoptive parents, had become a nurse and had three children with her husband, a physician.

Van continued to teach at Lynchburg College to the end of his career. In the 1960s, he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and a supporter of the feminist movement, although he eventually abandoned the latter in the belief that it had become too radical. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him as one of the earliest users of the word sexist, in the pamphlet "Freedom for Movement Girls Now", published by the Southern Student Organizing Committee (a progressive student organization in the southern United States), wherein he was active during the 1960s. He was also a candidate for public office on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in Virginia.

After his conversion to Catholicism, he was a contributing editor of the New Oxford Review and a frequent contributor to Crisis and Southern Partisan magazines, as well as to other periodicals and newspapers. He expressed sympathy for the Confederacy in his 1985 book, The Glittering Illusion, although he was always critical of racism and slavery.

He remained an ardent Anglophile all his life, and often used British spelling and expressions in his writing.

Sheldon Vanauken died of cancer on October 28, 1996. His ashes were scattered in the churchyard of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Forest, Virginia, as those of his wife Davy had been forty years previously. Some were also scattered in a churchyard in Binsey, England, where a friend, Edmund Dews, had scattered some of Davy's ashes after her death. (Lewis' letter agreeing to scatter the ashes was lost in the mail, so Vanauken asked Edmund to do it.)

A movie version of A Severe Mercy was in development by Origin Entertainment in 2008. As of 2010, progress on making the film has apparently been suspended.