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The Representation and Reappraisal of St. Monica of Hippo in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing
- Christianity & Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 69, Number 4, December 2020
- pp. 528-548
- 10.1353/chy.2020.0065
- Article
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Abstract:
Since she was commemorated as a saint in 387, Monica of Hippo has come to represent ideals of motherhood to successive generations. This article considers how three nineteenth-century women writers—Anna Jameson, Christina Rossetti, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—engage with this legacy to offer new ways of imagining the empowering social potential of faith. In my analysis, I indicate how they contribute to the Incarnation-inflected discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century and provide a helpful backdrop to understanding recent feminist appraisals of Augustine.