Atheist Prophecy
Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and the Victorian Poetess
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12410966 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Charles LaPorte (University of Washington, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 427-441 |
| Publication date | 2006-08-25 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150306051254 |
| OpenAlex | W2148075335 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 4 |
Scholars of nineteenth-century women's poetry often recount that the sentimental piety – indeed, the quasi-religiosity – of the Victorian “poetess” disappears from women's poetry in the mordant irony of the fin de siècle. Virginia Blain, for instance, has recently identified Mathilde Blind and Constance Naden as representatives of “the new breed of post-Darwinian atheists” that comes to replace an earlier, implicitly Christian feminine tradition associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Blain 332). On a related note, I have recently proposed that George Eliot's Legend of Jubal collections (1874, 1878) present a rather late instance of this poetess tradition (LaPorte 159–61). In what follows, I would like to argue that fin-de-siècle iconoclasts such as Blind and Naden actually work hard to reclaim and redeem some of the prominent religious elements of the mid-century poetess tradition, and that Eliot's unusual combination of sentimental piety and religious skepticism gives them a particularly useful model for doing so
Art · Legend · Literature · Piety · Poetry · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies · Religious Studies
| Citations per year | 0.21 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2023 (12) |
| Highly cited | No |