Abstract
At first sight, the significant contributions of Victorian women writers to religious discourse seem paradoxical. Barred from university and pulpit, women were excluded from the dominant theological genres of treatise and sermon. They were not allowed to preach in the Anglican Church, and although early Wesleyan Methodists had permitted women’s preaching, it was banned in 1802 and survived in only a few splinter sects of Methodism and in the Quaker meeting-house.1 Indeed, social norms clearly forbade women’s engagement with theological issues, as John Ruskin (1819–1900) noted in Sesame and Lilies (1865): ‘There is one dangerous science for women—one which they must indeed beware how they profanely touch—that of theology’.2
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Notes
For more detail on Methodist women’s preaching, see Deborah M. Valenze Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985)
Christine L. Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth Century Social Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, Sesame and Lilies (1865; Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1899), p. 73.
Susan Drain provides a fascinating discussion of the way the editors of Hymns, Ancient and Modern changed the dominant philosophy of hymn publishing by enforcing copyright for the first time in her book: The Anglican Church in Nineteenth Century Britain: Hymns Ancient and Modern (1860–1875) (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989).
The Invalid’s Hymnbook, ed. by Charlotte Elliott (Dublin: John Robertson, 1834).
Hugh White, Preface to The Invalid’s Hymnbook, ed. by Charlotte Elliott (Dublin: John Robertson, 1834), p. xxi
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, working-class uprisings were regarded as a constant threat, and popular working-class literature was thought to promote attitudes conducive to such rebellions, while moral literature was supposed to prevent Britain from suffering its own violent revolution. See Victor Neuberg, ‘More, Hannah’, in The Popular Press Companion to Popular Literature (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983), pp. 133–4.
Janis Dawson, ‘Sherwood, Mary Martha’, in British Children’s Writers, 1800–1880, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. by Meena Khorana (Detroit: Gale, 1996), pp. 267–81.
Suzanne L. G. Rickard, ‘“Living by the Pen”: Hesba Stretton’s Moral Earnings’, Women’s History Review 5:2 (1996): 219–38 (p. 224).
John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and the Holydays throughout the Year (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1927).
Harriet Martineau, Devotional Exercises, Consisting of Reflections and Prayers, for the Use of Young Persons, to Which Is Added a Treatise on the Lord’s Supper (London: Rowland Hunter, 1923).
Mary Carpenter, Morning and Evening Meditations for Every Day in a Month (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1847).
Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Thoughts for Holy Week, for the Use of Young Persons (London: Longmans, 1857).
Elizabeth Rundle Charles, By Thy Glorious Resurrection and Ascension: Easter Thoughts (London: SPCK, 1888); The Beatitudes: Thoughts for All Saints’ Day (London: SPCK, 1889); By the Coming of the Holy Ghost: Thoughts For Whitsuntide (London: SPCK, 1888).
Christina Rossetti, Letter and Spirit (London: SPCK, 1883), p. 17.
For more on the scriptural interpretation and gender ideology of Letter and Spirit, see Amanda W. Benckhuysen, ‘The Prophetic Voice of Christina Rossetti’, in Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible, ed. by Christiana de Groot and Marion Ann Taylor (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), pp. 165–80.
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Personal Recollections (London: R. B. Seeley & W. Burnside, 1841).
Josephine Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London: H. Marshall, 1896)
Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Autobiography (London: Longmans, 1907)
Marianne Farningham, A Working Woman’s Life (London: James Clarke, 1907).
Emma Worboise, The Life of Thomas Arnold (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1859)
Charlotte M. Yonge, Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop to the Melanesian Islands (London: Macmillan, 1874).
Charlotte M. Yonge, Hannah More (London: W. H. Allen, 1888).
Josephine Butler, Catherine of Siena: A Biography (London: Dyer Brothers, 1878).
Clara Lucas Balfour, Women of Scripture (London: Houlston & Stoneman, 1847)
Grace Aguilar, The Women of Israel; or, Characters and Sketches from the Holy Scriptures and Jewish History (1845), 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Groombridge & Sons, 1852)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Woman in Sacred History: Sketches Drawn from Scriptural, Historical and Legendary Sources (New York, NY: J. B. Ford, 1874)
Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Sketches of the Women of Christendom (London: SPCK, 1889).
Rebecca Styler, Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), p. 77.
Josef L. Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 1.
Monica Correa Fryckstedt, ‘Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and The Christian Lady’s Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 14 (Summer 1981): 42–51 (p. 45).
Charlotte M. Yonge, ‘Introductory Letter’, Monthly Packet 1 (1851): i–iv (p. i and iii).
See Kristine Moruzi, Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 (New York, NY: Ashgate, 2012), p. 24.
Charlotte M. Yonge, ‘Womankind’, Monthly Packet N.S. 17 (1874): 24–9 (p. 28).
Emma Jane (Guyton) Worboise, ‘Editorial Address’, Christian World Magazine, vol. 1 (January 1866): 1–3 (p. 2).
Florence Nightingale, Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth among the Artizans of England (1860), in Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale: Selections and Commentaries, ed. by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. Macrae (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 113–14.
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Melnyk, J. (2018). Religious Genres. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_11
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