Read more
Until now, the missionary plot in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has been seen as marginal and anomalous. Despite women missionaries being ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, they appeared to be absent from nineteenth-century literature. As this book demonstrates, though, the female missionary character and narrative was, in fact, present in a range of writings from missionary newsletters and life writing, to canonical Victorian literature, New Woman fiction and women's college writing. Nineteenth-century women writers wove the tropes of the female missionary figure and plot into their domestic fiction, and the female missionary themes of religious self-sacrifice and heroism formed the subjectivity of these writers and their characters. Offering an alternative narrative for the development of women writers and early feminism, as well as a new reading of Jane Eyre, this book adds to the debate about whether religious women in the nineteenth century could actually be radical and feminist.
List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Prologue - Ann Judson and Harriet Newell: Immortalising the Female Missionary
Part I: 1830–1870
1. Tales of Female Missionary Sacrifice: Tracts, Collective Biographies and Newsletters
2. Missionary Self-Sacrifice in the Domestic Sphere: The Tracts and Novels of Martha Sherwood, Hesba Stretton and Dinah Craik
3. Novel Approaches to Missionary Sacrifice: Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell
Part II: 1880–1900
4. Missionaries of the New: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Margaret Harkness
5. Women, Religion and Power: University Women’s Missionary Writing
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Angharad Eyre currently teaches in the English Department at Queen Mary University of London and lives in the city with her husband and two small children.
Summary
Until now, the female missionary has appeared to be absent from 19th century literature. This book provides new readings of texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to reveal the presence of the female missionary in 19th century writing, arguing that the character influenced cultural debates about religion, gender and domesticity
