Happiness by Veronica Owen

Description

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.