ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Professor Florence Boos,
for thoughtful and prompt feedback, a willingness to share her extraordinarily broad
knowledge of Victorian poetry, and encouragement to keep moving forward. She has
mentored me both professionally and personally from the formative stages of this project
to its completion. Her teaching and research have inspired me and many other young
scholars to explore Victorian women’s poetry and social activism.
I owe many thanks to all the members of my dissertation committee—Lori
Branch, Teresa Mangum, Jeffrey Cox, and Naomi Greyser—for sharing their expertise,
providing incisive comments, and offering constructive advice. Lori Branch’s seminar
“Religion, Secularism, and Modernity” and Teresa Mangum’s seminar on Victorian
periodical culture also proved invaluable to the development of this project.
I am grateful to the University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for
their support through the Marcus Bach Graduate Fellowship, which enabled a semester of
focused dissertation work. Additionally, I want to thank the Midwest Victorian Studies
Association for the Walter L. Arnstein Prize for Dissertation Research and the University
of Iowa’s English Department for the Freda Dixon Malone Dissertation Scholarship, both
of which provided monetary support to conduct dissertation research. I am also indebted
to the University of Iowa’s Graduate College for the T. Anne Cleary International
Dissertation Research Fellowship, which funded my archival research in London.
Both this project and my experience of writing it were enriched by the intelligent
and generous community of graduate students at the University of Iowa, who gave me
much-needed feedback and fellowship. In particular, I am grateful to my “dissertation
buddy” Jennifer Ambrose, who offered comments, brainstorming, and commiseration
during our weekly Skype meetings and to my graduate school roommates Katherine
Bishop and Bridget Draxler for sharing ideas, meals, study sessions, and study breaks. I
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have been blessed by an abundance of dear friends in the English department who
travelled this road right before me, including Joanne Janssen, Laura Capp, Ann Pleiss
Morris, Stacy Erickson, Deborah Manion, and many others. I am deeply thankful to all of
you for being my models and for never neglecting to pass on your knowledge and
wisdom.
I have dedicated this dissertation to my family and to a life-long friend and
mentor, Dr. Kathleen O’Donovan. Kathleen called me every other week to offer
encouragement and to talk about my dissertation ideas before she died of cancer in
September 2013. My parents Stan and Karen Stenson, who, ever the literary enthusiasts,
requested that in the dedication they be referred to in Dickensian terms as my “Aged
P’s,” have been unflagging encouragers, intrepid proofreaders, and the best of audiences.
Finally, thanks to my husband Justin for his support, patience, and continually calming
demeanor.
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ABSTRACT
“The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to
Immanence in British Women’s Writing, 1835-1925” traces a tradition of religious
women poets and women’s poetic communities engaged in generic and theological
exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project
brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social
history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentiethcentury
women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into
modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus
questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization
during the nineteenth century.
These writers, including contributors to the Christian Lady’s Magazine, Grace
Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned
to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than
above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic
theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British
Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the
everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly
revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women’s private lives. Just as the women
in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also
blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was
increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across
the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly
large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to
women’s suffrage, to pacifism.
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This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a
poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two
chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform
within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the
desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets
demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth
chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and
early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological
emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that
the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to
illustrate God’s equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring
challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1
Directions in Women’s Religious Poetry .........................................................4
Women’s Writing Across Genres...................................................................10
The Public Implications of Women’s Religious Poetry .................................16
Engaging the Secularization Debate...............................................................21
Defining Poetry’s Relationship to Religion....................................................29
Immanence in the Secularization Debate .......................................................30
Overview of Chapters.....................................................................................36
CHAPTER ONE: BATTLING DIFFERENCE AND INDIFFERENCE: THE
AMBIVALENT, EVANGELICAL POETICS OF THE CHRISTIAN
LADY’S MAGAZINE ......................................................................................39
Encountering Religious Difference ................................................................41
The Generic Building Tools of Faith..............................................................46
Poetry in the Periodical Press .........................................................................50
The Dangers of Sentiment ..............................................................................54
Coming to Terms with Poetic Authorship......................................................58
Poetry and Women’s Sphere: Fledgling Immanence .....................................64
Immanence and Gender Ideology...................................................................68
Genre and Public Voice..................................................................................70
The Spiritual Uses of Poetry...........................................................................71
Uniting Poetry and Prose in Social Causes ....................................................73
Dealing with Difference .................................................................................79
Literary Encounters with Difference ..............................................................85
Publishing Across Religious Boundaries .......................................................95
Uniting for Reform .......................................................................................107
Conclusion ....................................................................................................119
CHAPTER TWO: “TIME HAS NEED OF ETERNITY”: DORA GREENWELL’S
PRESENTIST POETICS AND ADVOCACY FOR THE MENTALLY
DISABLED ..................................................................................................122
The Issue of Privatization .............................................................................128
Immanence in Greenwell’s Theology...........................................................132
Reconciling Poetry and Religion..................................................................136
Carmina Crucis: an “Inward” History of the Soul .......................................140
Part II of Carmina Crucis.............................................................................156
Part III of Carmina Crucis............................................................................163
“The humblest flower hath leave to blow”: Greenwell’s Advocacy for
Asylum Reform ............................................................................................171
Conclusion ....................................................................................................191
CHAPTER THREE: EXPANDING CATHOLIC COMMUNITY: ALICE
MEYNELL’S VISION OF CHRIST IN THE WORLD..............................193
“Manifesto of Merry England”.....................................................................208
Medievalism and Modernity.........................................................................217
Religious Womanhood .................................................................................228
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A Poetics of Process .....................................................................................235
Religious Instinct..........................................................................................243
Conclusion ....................................................................................................251
CHAPTER FOUR: MYSTICISM IN THE MUNDANE: EVELYN UNDERHILL
AND EVA GORE-BOOTH’S THEORIZATION OF IMMANENCE
IN EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY WOMEN’S POETRY ..................254
Immanence as an Element of Mysticism......................................................266
Evelyn Underhill’s Poetics of Immanence ...................................................270
Eva Gore-Booth’s Poetry and “The Kingdom of heaven that is within” .....286
The Active Mystic ........................................................................................293
Poetry and Religion ......................................................................................310
Conclusion ....................................................................................................316
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................319
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................325
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