Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry (review)

“Why,” queries F. Elizabeth Gray, “do we need to examine Victorian women’s religious poetry? There’s a lot of it; a lot of it is very much the same; a lot of it is quite frankly doggerel; and even when ‘good’ poets write it, their secular verse holds much more appeal for the modern taste” (3). This question reveals both Gray’s bravery and ambition in devoting an entire study to a subset of Victorian poetry that many of us have no qualms about ignoring. We know, of course, that Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote about religion in creative and compelling ways, but in this study Gray is just as passionate—if not more so—about recuperating a multitude of relatively (or completely) forgotten writers and poems. Figures such as Rossetti, Barrett Browning, Felicia Hemans, and Adelaide Procter are discussed alongside Edith Skelton, Emma Frances Bevan, Elizabeth Ayton Godwin, Augusta Theodosia Drane, and Mrs. A. Stuart Menteath, among others.

A significant contribution of this study is simply reminding us of the role and proliferation of women’s religious and devotional poetry in the Victorian era. We know that “producing literature was in fact a vital part of Victorian women’s practice of Christianity” (14), but certainly much more attention has been paid to women’s contributions to so-called religious or controversial fiction than verse. Gray plunges into this vast body of work “to suggest new ways of reading religious women poets that interrogate the obscurity masking or dismissing their contribution to social, cultural and Christian narratives, and to contend that the work that these women did, in the form of religious poetry, made a significant contribution to Christian discourse, to lyric tradition, and to contemporary views of womanhood” (1). While the book may be more successful at achieving the former goal than the latter, it raises some interesting questions about Victorian women poets and prompts reflection on the challenges inherent in studying Victorian women’s religious and devotional literature as a whole.

The book’s first chapter forms an extension to the introduction; both sections lay out the author’s contention that Victorian women’s religious and devotional verse is worthy of serious and respectful scholarly treatment. Gray defines devotional poetry as a subset of religious verse: a form of poetry that grows out of the practice of religious worship, and “take[s] already established theological interpretations as a starting point and discuss[es] their application” (17). Such verse, she argues, “was insistently gendered feminine by the Victorians, and as insistently distinguished from ‘masculine theological writing’” (17). Not only was devotional poetry a feminine genre, but it was written by “Christian women . . . for other Christian women,” and these “women poets created the rules by which this body of verse was to be read and valued, and they created an identity for a devout, feminine, yet still privileged follower of Christ” (9).

The book’s second chapter focuses on how Victorian women poets engaged with Scripture, both questioning “the biases and assumptions of androcentric scriptural texts,” and drawing upon the Bible “as a resource or prototype for creativity” (9). Chapter 3 explores Victorian poets’ appropriations of female biblical characters, which “argued for contemporary relevance and predicted future expansion of the female role” and engaged with the issue of women’s exclusion from “spiritual, secular, and literary histories” (9, 10). Chapter 4 addresses the construction of personal relationships in women’s devotional poetry, in particular the “production of a feminized I that could particulate in direct relationship with God” (10). Chapter 5 examines the aesthetic conventions of women’s devotional poetry, boldly arguing that what we might dislike most about such writing—its sentimentality, clichés, and excessive ornamentation—“should be read as a particular and legitimate form of expression, moulded by cultural exigencies, and vividly eloquent about the conditions influencing its own formation” (10).

I agree wholeheartedly with the book’s premise that Victorian religious...