What did happiness mean to a young woman beginning to imagine the life she hoped to lead?
While living in Germany in the 1950s, Veronica Owen began creating an extraordinary book. Into its pages she carefully copied poems, prayers, biblical passages, songs and prose, placing them alongside pictures chosen for their beauty and meaning. She gave her collection a simple title: Happiness.
The result is at once a personal anthology, a spiritual journal and an intricately assembled work of art. Its pages move through love and friendship, faith and devotion, home and belonging, the natural world, longing, sorrow, hope and the search for a life well lived.
Although Happiness belongs naturally to the German tradition of the Poesiealbum – an album filled with verses, quotations, pictures and words of wisdom – it is also something more individual. Almost every entry was selected, arranged and written out by Veronica herself. Rather than recording the voices of a circle of contributors, the book gradually reveals the sensibility of its creator: what moved her, what she believed and what she dreamed her future might become.
Now carefully transcribed and reproduced, Happiness preserves both the content and character of the original album. It is an intimate family treasure, but its appeal reaches far beyond one family. The book will speak to readers interested in women’s lives, personal archives, social history, poetry, faith, memory and the quiet forms of creativity through which people make sense of their lives.
Tender, beautiful and deeply human, Happiness is both a portrait of a young woman and a message carried from one generation to another.
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Belle Wilson –
Happiness by Veronica Owen is a remarkable little glimpse into the world as seen by a seventeen-year-old English girl spending a year in post-war Germany.
The poems themselves are written by other poets; what makes this collection special is that Veronica chose them. During her year in Germany, she gathered together poems that spoke to her — poems about happiness, love, life, longing and the many emotions that make us human.
Knowing that the person making these choices was just seventeen gives the collection an unexpected intimacy. She was young, far from home, experiencing a country emerging from the shadow of war, and discovering her own place in the world.
What struck me most is how easily a young girl today could recognise something of herself in those choices. The world may have changed enormously since Veronica was seventeen, but the questions we ask ourselves at that age have not disappeared: Who am I? What makes me happy? What does love mean? Where do I belong? What kind of life do I want?
Perhaps that is the real charm of Happiness. It isn’t a book telling us what happiness should be. It is a glimpse into the poems one young woman chose while finding her way through an unfamiliar world.
And that makes it feel wonderfully timeless — a reminder that, whatever the decade, seventeen is seventeen.