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Reviewed by:
  • Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing by Elizabeth Anderson
  • Geneviève Brassard
MATERIAL SPIRITUALITY IN MODERNIST WOMEN'S WRITING, by Elizabeth Anderson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. 209 pp. $120.00 hardback; $39.95 paperback; $94.85 ebook.

Elizabeth Anderson's capacious monograph, Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing, makes a timely and valuable intervention in a number of growing fields, including the relationship between modernism and religion, "thing" studies, and the material turn in religious studies, among other conceptual frameworks. Anderson positions her work at the intersection of complementary lenses to argue for the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach to humanities questions. The book deploys "new work from anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies" to analyze literary texts by H. D., Mary Butts, Virginia Woolf, and Gwendolyn Brooks; this focus contributes to the "growth of feminist modernist studies" and fills a gender gap in recent studies of modernism and religion (pp. 10, 5, 4). Drawing from Jane Bennett's Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (2001) and Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), Anderson aligns her project most closely to Rosi Braidotti's work on "post-secular spirituality" to argue for attention to "everyday objects" and "domestic environments and relations" in literary texts as needed to achieve a more fine-grained view of spiritual practices (p. 14). Anderson uses a "case study approach rather than a more comprehensive history" for greater depth of analysis, inviting interested scholars to explore the spirituality of things in additional authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, and Sylvia Townsend Warner (p. 15).

The first four chapters each center on key texts from H. D., Butts, Woolf, and Brooks, with the volume's last chapter turning from the domestic space to the urban environment in select works by each author. The chapter on H. D. centers her experience of two world wars, as reflected in her writing from the 1940s. Anderson draws from H. D.'s exchange of gifts with Sigmund Freud to develop her analysis of the way H. D. processed war trauma through her "subsequent search for consolation which she found in relationships, spirituality and creative practice" (p. 19). H. D.'s main texts of the period, including the memoir "Writing on the Walls" (1945) and the novels The Gift (1982) and The Sword Went Out to Sea (1946-1947) provide evidence of her belief that "encounters with the divine are enmeshed in the material world," as well as examples of her turn to domestic craft such as embroidery as "relief from the incessant anxiety" of living in London during World War II (p. 20). For Anderson, H. D. "holds together oppositional modes: connection and rupture, mourning and healing practice, material and spirit, stitching and writing" (p. 44). [End Page 359]

The second chapter centers Butts's lifelong belief in "the divine hidden and revealed within the things around her" and considers the role of the Holy Grail "as both object and idea" in Butts's novel Armed With Madness (1928), as well as the way she apprehends the "life of things" and their relation to landscape in her memoir The Crystal Cabinet (1937) (pp. 47, 48). Butts "had no desire to evaporate into an astral plane, her aim was to realize sacred realities within materiality," and her interest in paganism, inspired by Jane Harrison's research, survived her conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, evolving into a "pagan-christian syncretism" that allowed for a "sacramental view of the landscape" detailed in her memoir (pp. 49, 55). Anderson suggests that in Butts's writing, "we see ordinary objects that become extraordinary by exceeding their everydayness in their emergence into radical differentiation" (p. 61).

Chapter three draws from feminist theologian Catherine Keller to argue for an "unorthodox view of spirituality in which the mystical and the material are deeply interrelated," looking primarily at Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) for the "uncanny nature of objects and assemblages" in domestic space (p. 67). More specifically, Anderson explores "material mysticism in the interplay of things and human persons in the Ramsays' house and in the emphasis on the liveliness of material world" in the "Time Passes" section...

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