Zenna Henderson (1917-1983) may not have the reputation of speculative fiction writers like Madeleine L’Engle, but her work was deeply important. While she may not be a “Christian writer” by some people’s standards, her work has attracted many readers who praise how she discusses faith. Sojourners contributor Elizabeth Palmberg included her works in a list of “spiritually-inflected science fiction.” Reactor Mag contributor Alan Brown praised how her stories were “infused with religious faith, and were often object lessons on the worst and best behaviors that faith can inspire.”
So, what can we learn from Zenna Henderson’s work?
Was Zenna Henderson a Christian Writer?
Whether Henderson was a “Christian writer” depends on her beliefs, readers’ expectations, and the publishing category she fits into.
Henderson’s beliefs place her within Judeo-Christian thought, but secondary resources often describe her as a Mormon. As recently as 2001, she was mentioned in the magazine Irreantum: Exploring Mormon Literature. However, that doesn’t give a full picture of her spiritual journey.
In a 1974 interview with Paul Walker, Henderson said, “I was reared a Mormon—both grandfathers and great-grandfathers had more than one wife—but I’m Methodist now.”
According to the Mormon Literature Database, she left Mormonism when she married Richard Harry Henderson. They married in 1944 and divorced seven years later; she began considering herself a Methodist sometime in this phase of her life.
While she identified the denomination she fit into, Henderson had an ecumenical approach to Christianity. Talking with Walker, she said, “One of the things about Methodism is that you can feel at home in any worship service. You may not agree with some tenets, but as long as the love of God is there, you can feel comfortable.” Bill Patterson reports that he knew Henderson at the end of her life when she was attending a nondenominational church in Phoenix, Arizona.
Walker highlighted how many of her stories emphasize returning to hope after disillusionment. When Walker asked her what she felt about faith, Henderson replied:
“The thing to believe in is the ultimate triumph of Good. And that God is a personal God who knows each one of us as we can’t know ourselves; who has given us life for a unique purpose that no one else can ever perform; that we are responsible for our every action, though, and word; and we will be held personally accountable for them when we go through Death into the presence of God. That we are never alone, never forsaken, never beyond God’s love and compassion—and always as important as if we were the only mortal ever created.”
She also had a sense of humor about faith, laughing at her long answer by adding, “Last of sermon?”
During the same interview, Henderson also offered practical advice for people who feel spiritually lost: “Well, if you feel you are far away from God, be advised—He isn’t the one who moved!”
While Henderson’s work shows her faith, she published before Christian fiction became a separate category in American Christian bookstores. Daniel Silliman reports in Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith that Janette Oke’s romance novel Loves Comes Softly created the market in the 1970s. By the time Henderson passed away in the 1980s, Christian publishing houses were releasing sci-fi and fantasy books by writers like Robert Siegel, but the market was still almost entirely romance novels. Christian speculative fiction did not fully come into their own until the late 1990s with novels like Firebird by Kathy Tyers.
Henderson didn’t publish “Christian fiction” according to industry labels; however, she used stories released through mainstream publishers to communicate spiritual themes—many of which will be discussed later.
How Did Zenna Henderson Become a Writer?
Zenna Henderson was born Zena Chlarson on November 1, 1917, in Tucson, Arizona, the second of five children. Lisa Yaszek notes in The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, that Henderson began spelling her name Zenna in the 1950s.
While Henderson wrote in several genres, including fantasy and poetry, her best-known work was sci-fi. Henderson told Walker that she began reading sci-fi and fantasy when she was 12, primarily in the magazines Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and Astounding Stories. She later discovered Jules Verne’s sci-fi novels through her library.
Henderson began writing early on. In a biographical piece for the August 1953 issue of Imagination, she said, “I wrote poetry and ‘plays’ from the fourth grade on up, but it wasn't until about four years ago [i.e., when she was around 36] that I really started writing fiction in earnest.” She told Walker that she decided to write sci-fi for a simple reason: “I ran out of good ones to read!”
Her first sci-fi story, “Come On, Wagon,” appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. She told Walker it was “my first published short story, except for a bad one published in the Christian Science Monitor.”
Like most authors, Henderson balanced writing with a day job. She became a first-grade teacher after getting her Bachelor’s from Arizona State Teachers College (now Arizona State College) in 1940. Henderson kept teaching first grade after getting her master’s from the same school in 1954. She taught primarily in Arizona, including at the Japanese internment camp Gila River Relocation in Sacaton, Arizona, in 1942-1943.
However, Henderson occasionally worked outside her home state. From 1956 to 1958, she taught French and German on an American airbase in France. From 1958 to 1959, she taught patients in the tuberculosis ward at Seaside Children’s Hospital in Waterford, Connecticut.
Her work as a teacher inspired her greatest writing. In 1952, she published “Ararat,” a short story about children who seem normal but belong to an extraterrestrial race who escaped their planet’s destruction by coming to Earth. They call themselves “the People” and have unusual powers that they struggle to hide, with mixed results, to survive in their new home. Henderson explained to scholar Sandra Miesel, “I started with the rather vague premise that the teacher has to keep one jump ahead of her pupils—or disaster. So what if the children were ‘magic’ and pulled ‘magic’ mischief but she didn’t know they were ‘magic’ and they didn’t know she was!”
Henderson wrote 17 stories about the People, often focusing on their children struggling to handle their powers. Miesel highlights how these stories made Henderson an innovator: sci-fi was only starting to depict children with unusual abilities in the late 1940s, and it wasn’t until after “Ararat” that many famous examples (like Wilmar H. Shiras’ Children of the Atom or John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos) were published.
What Made People Notice Zenna Henderson’s Work?
While Henderson’s short story “Come On Wagon” wasn’t published until 1951, she began attracting notice even before it appeared. Thrilling Adventure Stories editor Sam Merwin Jr. mentioned her in an editorial for the magazine’s December 1950 issue, describing her as one of the new female sci-fi writers about to become published professionals and change the market.
Mary Shelley arguably invented sci-fi with Frankenstein, and women began publishing sci-fi in magazines from the market’s early days in the 1920s. However, they struggled to find acceptance for decades. As Bill Gerken observed in an article for Kyriokos, for decades, “it seemed natural that most science fiction writers would be male, as well as most of the readers. So natural that Judith Merril and Zenna Henderson stood out as oddities, and no self-respecting teenage girl would read ‘that trash’ or, if she did, only her diary shared her secret.”
Merwin pokes fun at how some male writers felt about the new wave of female writers by calling them “the Great Invasion or the Great Erosion depending upon the point of view.” Through the 1960s, many women avoided controversy by using pen names. For example, Alice Bradley Sheldon published her fiction under the name James Triptree Jr. Henderson was one of the first women to avoid male pseudonyms, creating space for more female voices in the sci-fi market.
During her lifetime, she received critical praise—she was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her story “Captivity”—and personal praise from various writers.
One of the more interesting commendations came from C.S. Lewis, not typically considered a sci-fi writer, but who did write a trilogy and several short stories in that genre. In a 1963 conversation about sci-fi with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis, he asked if they had read a short story about a mother alien seeking food for her children. Lewis called the story a perfect example of how “some science fiction really does deal with issues far more serious than those realistic fiction deals with.” Douglas A. Anderson explains in his book Tales Before Narnia that Lewis is describing Henderson’s short story “Food to All Flesh.”
Interestingly, Lewis and Henderson both contributed to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: Henderson with numerous stories from 1952 to 1980, Lewis with “The Shoddy Lands” in 1956, and “Ministering Angels” in 1958. Anthony Boucher included “Ministering Angels” and “Captivity” in The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series.
During the last two decades of Henderson’s life, some of her work reached new audiences through adaptations. One of the best-remembered stories from the People series, “Pottage,” was adapted into the 1972 TV movie The People starring William Shatner. Her short story “Hush” was adapted into an episode of the anthology TV show Tales from the Darkside in 1988.
How Is Zenna Henderson Remembered Today?
Today, several notable Christians who write sci-fi have cited her influence. Kathy Tyers, author of mainstream sci-fi novels like Truce at Bakura and Christian sci-fi novels like Firebird, stated that Henderson taught her about “unique characters with believable motives.”
Connie Willis, author of acclaimed sci-fi novels like Doomsday Book, described Henderson as one of the first sci-fi writers whose work she fell in love with. Willis even said she initially got an education degree because “My plan was to teach and write in the summers and on spring and Christmas breaks, a la Zenna Henderson.”
Several acclaimed writers outside Christianity have also cited Henderson as one of their inspirations.
Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) said that she discovered Henderson’s stories when she was 15 and appreciated how Henderson “wrote about telepathy and other things I was interested in, from the point of view of young women.” Raised Baptist, Butler left organized religion after age 12 but has been praised for intelligently wrestling with religious themes in her works.
Mormon author Orson Scott Card described his early work as including “the Zenna Henderson-influenced Worthing stories.” The Worthing series includes two novels and two short story collections, mostly following telepathic hero Jason Worthing’s adventures.
Lois McMaster Bujold has described Henderson as one of the sci-fi writers she remembers fondly when she discovered the genre as a child. In a Christianity Today article, R.S. Naifeh highlights how Bujold is an agnostic who takes faith seriously in stories like her World of the Five Gods series.
Jo Walton has written warmly about discovering the People stories as a teenager: “The stories are filled with deep religious sensibility, a profound sense of joy, and they’re the most comforting thing any lonely misunderstood teenager could possibly wish for. They’re about being special and finding other special people. This is one note, but it’s one note played incredibly well.” Walton has been described as a secular writer fascinated by religious questions, which she has explored in books like Lent: A Novel of Many Returns and occasionally in articles on religious sci-fi.
Henderson’s range of admirers shows that while her writing attracts readers who sympathize with her faith, she also accomplished the rare task of making her beliefs accessible to readers inside and outside Christianity.
What Can We Learn about Faith and Writing from Zenna Henderson’s Work?
Henderson not only became a well-known writer at a time when few women were openly writing sci-fi, but also communicated her spiritual beliefs in ways that Christian writers can learn from today. Here are five particular things we can learn from her approach to Christian-informed fiction:
1. Sentimental isn’t bad if it’s done well. Author Bud Webster argued in a column for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association that Henderson’s great skill was being sentimental without “gratuitous and blatant button-pushing . . . [Henderson] may have pushed the odd button or two, but she certainly didn’t whang on them like a lab-rat jonesing for kibble. She tweaked them gently to remind us that they were there for a reason, then held those reasons up for us to marvel at.”
2. Writing about children doesn’t mean making everything cute. Perhaps one reason Henderson’s work was sentimental yet not overdone is that she wrote about children and teachers without making everyone unnaturally nice. Miesel highlighted how Henderson’s stories, from “You Know What Teacher?” to “The Last Step,” provide a range of good to bad teachers and never try to make children into tiny adults.
3. Care for the outcast. Butler and others have noted how well Henderson depicted isolation and struggle. Henderson (quoting John Donne) told Walker that she saw this theme as simply the human condition: “Each of us is an island in the last analysis.” Webster suggested that she also knew something about persecution from growing up in a Mormon family and her time teaching in an internment camp. Whatever inspired her, Henderson captured the dignity of oppressed and isolated people very well.
4. Sacred and secular aren’t as far apart as we think. While some writers write about God’s grace as if it suddenly appears at certain moments in our lives, Henderson understood it as permeating our lives. Miesel recalls her saying, “Being conscious of the Hand of God in everything doesn’t mean tenting your hands and rolling your eyes up at appropriate intervals.” Talking with Walker, she said, “The miraculous in daily life I write about because I am so conscious of it all the time. Miracles go on all the time. Oh, not the wave-a-wand, boi-oi-oing! type of miracles, but all the wonderful, slow miracles of life, growth, being.”
5. Faith affects our lives in little as well as big ways. Henderson’s stories contained many religious references and images. Webster highlighted how every story about the People has a title with biblical allusions: “Ararat” is the mountain where Noah’s ark settled after the Flood (Genesis 8:4). “Pottage” comes from the word that the King James Bible uses for the pot of stew that Jacob made and sold to Esau for Esau’s birthright (Genesis 25:29-34). However, her biggest impact on readers seems to have been how she captured the subtle ways faith affects people’s everyday lives. In a statement for Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Volume II, Henderson said, “from the fan letters I receive (which cover an amazing range of ages, occupations, and geographic locations), the consensus seems to be that I depict the sort of ordinary people who so often get trampled in a technological society, and also the ‘goodness’ and orderliness of a life that is functioning according to a plan no matter how much we hack it up. In other words, man is not the measure of life—God is.”
Books by Zenna Henderson
Unlike many of her contemporaries’ works, Henderson’s tales are still easy to find. During her lifetime, her stories about the People have appeared in various collections, including Pilgrimage: The Book of the People in 1961 and The People: No Different Flesh in 1968. In 1995, Mark Olson and Priscilla Olson collected complete stories in the anthology Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson.
Her stories that don’t feature the People were collected in The Anything Box in 1965 and Holding Wonder in 1971. In 2020, Patricia Morgan Lang compiled them into Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson.
Individual short stories appeared in various anthologies, including:
- The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women edited by A. Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones
- Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
- Cassandra Rising edited by Alice Laurance.
- The Golden Road: Great Tales of Fantasy & The Supernatural edited by Damon Knight
- Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction edited by Martin Greenberg, Frederick Pol, and Joseph D. Olander.
- 12 Great Classics of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin.
- Scary! Stories that will make you Scream! edited by Peter Haining.
- You and Science Fiction by Bernard C. Hollister.
- The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1949-1954 edited by Annette Peltz-McComas
- Don’t Open This Book! and Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling Woman, both edited by Marvin Kaye.
- Extraterrestrials (also published as Young Extraterrestrials) edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh.
- Speculations: 17 Stories Written Especially for This Volume By Well-Known Science Fiction Authors, But Their Names are Concealed By a Code and It's Up to You to Figure Out Who Wrote What edited by Isaac Asimov and Alice Laurance.
Books on Zenna Henderson
While there isn’t a biography on Henderson yet, key information about her life appears in several books.
Walker’s interview was published in Luna Monthly’s May 1974 issue and Odyssey’s Spring 1976 issue before he collected it into the book Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews.
Yaszek discusses Henderson in The Future Is Female! and in Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction.
Henderson is also mentioned in the following books:
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls.
- The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier.
- Something About the Author Volume 5: Facts and Pictures about Contemporary Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People edited by Anne Commire
- Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 by Eric Leif Davin.
- Twentieth Century American Science-Fiction Writers edited by David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer.
- Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Volume II edited by Robert Reginald, Douglas Menville, and Mary A. Burges.
- Architects of Tomorrow Volume VII by Don D’Ammassa.
Several scholars who study sci-fi have discussed Henderson’s stories:
- In Extrapolations, Farah Mendlesohn Farah Mendlesohn discusses “Subcommittee” as an example of gender roles in sci-fi stories.
- In Western American Literature, Fred Erisman discusses how Henderson’s stories use frontier imagery in a sci-fi setting.
- In Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Andy Sawyer uses Henderson’s stories to show how sci-fi stories portray mental powers.
Researchers can find several of Henderson’s manuscripts in the Willis E. McNelly Science Fiction Collection at California State University Fullerton and several letters in the Special Collections at Brigham Young University.
Photo Credit:©GettyImages/Max2611
This article is part of our People of Christianity catalog that features the stories, meaning, and significance of well-known people from the Bible and history. Here are some of the most popular articles for knowing important figures in Christianity:
How Did the Apostle Paul Die?
Who are the Nicolaitans in Revelation?
Who Was Deborah in the Bible?
Who Was Moses in the Bible?
King Solomon's Story in the Bible
Who Was Lot's Wife in the Bible?
Who Was Jezebel in the Bible?
Who Was the Prodigal Son?
