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ATHEIST PROPHECY: MATHILDE BLIND, CONSTANCE NADEN, AND THE VICTORIAN POETESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2006

Charles LaPorte
Charles LaPorte
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

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.

Type
The Victorian Legacy
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , September 2006 , pp. 427 - 441
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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