Abstract
This first volume of Audrey Donnithorne’s autobiography covers the 1922–1985 period of her life. With detail and humor, she revisits the first two-thirds of her most varied life and shares unique insights about historical moments and ecclesial evolutions. Born in 1922 in Sichuan, Western China, to evangelical Anglican missionaries, she soon returned to the heartland of late-imperial Britain to continue her education. In April 1940, she crossed to France a few days before the Nazi invasion, then eventually to China, where she spent three years with her parents. It was during this stay in the Middle Kingdom that she decided to convert to Catholicism.
Back in London, having completed a two-year service in the Directorate of Military Intelligence at the War Office, she studied economics at Oxford and eventually met Margaret Roberts, who we know as Margaret Thatcher. After graduation and despite her reluctance for academia, she worked as a research assistant in the Department of Political Economy at University College London. She engaged with various studies on Southeast Asian and China’s economies and conducted regular field studies across Asia. In 1969, she moved to Canberra and worked at the Australian National University, where she was soon appointed as head of the Contemporary China Centre.
From 1973, this new geographical proximity and academic status allowed her to repeatedly visit the People’s Republic of China for academic reasons and meet with an increasing number of local pastors, priests, and bishops. Yet her growing scholarly focus on mainland China did not prevent her from traveling across Australia, Asia, the Soviet Union, and Europe, to the point of finding herself in Nazareth on the morning of Yom Kippur in 1973, the day when a coalition of Arab states attacked Israel.
This first volume ends with Donnithorne’s retirement from academia and move to Hong Kong. She will spend the following two decades visiting and supporting the reconstruction of the Church in China. This story will be the subject of her upcoming second volume. Nevertheless, this first publication provides an extremely useful account of how people, eras, places, and social milieus connect and intersect in the making of contemporary Christianity in China. This autobiography is especially valuable for its detailed mapping of the social networks—whether in the upper class of imperial Britain, academic circles, or the global Church—which infused the life of Audrey Donnithorne and her contribution to Christianity.