Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality A Piercing Darkness

Concentrating on female modernists specifically, this volume examines spiritual issues and their connections to gender during the modernist period. Scholarly inquiry surrounding women writers and their relation to what Wassily Kandinsky famously hoped would be an ‘Epoch of the Great Spiritual’ has generated myriad contexts for closer analysis including: feminist theology, literary and religious history, psychoanalysis, queer and trauma theory. This book considers canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf while also attending to critically overlooked or poorly understood figures such as H.D., Mary Butts, Rose Macaulay, Evelyn Underhill, Christopher St. John and Dion Fortune. With wide-ranging topics such as the formally innovative poetry of Stevie Smith and Hope Mirrlees to Evelyn Underhill’s mystical treatises and correspondence, this collection of essays aims to grant voices to the mostly forgotten female voices of the modernist period, showing how spirituality played avital role in their lives and writing.

Introduction: The Intricate Persistence of Strange Gods, Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford and Heather Walton.- Radical Unorthodoxy: Religious and Literary Modernisms in H.D. and Mary Butts, Suzanne Hobson.- Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn Underhill, the Subliminal Consciousness and Spiritual Direction, Jamie Callison.- Stevie Smith’s serious play: a modernist reframing of Christian orthodoxy, Gillian Boughton.- Faith in Ruins: Fragments and Pattern in the Late Works of Rose Macaulay, Heather Walton.- Jane Harrison’s Ritual Scholarship, Mimi Winick.- Antiquarian Magic: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Theory and Hope Mirrlees’s Paris, Nina Enemark.- Childish Things: Spirituality, Materiality and Creativity in Mary Butts’s The Crystal Cabinet, Elizabeth Anderson.- Spectral Poetics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.- Sheela Banerjee.- The Queer Movements of Ecstasy and Asceticism in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul and Madeleine: One of Love’sJansenists, Ellen Ricketts.- Dora Marsden and the "WORLD-INCLUSIVE I": Egoism, Mysticism and Radical Feminism, Steven Quincey-Jones.- What lies below the horizon of life: the occult fiction of Dion Fortune, Andrew Radford.- What Words Conceal: H.D.’s occult word-alchemy in the 1950s, Matte Robinson.- Afterword: Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality, Lara Vetter.- Notes on Contributors.- Index.

Elizabeth Anderson is Impact Research Fellow at the University of Stirling. She is the author of H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination and has published in Literature and Theology, Women: A Cultural Review and Christianity and Literature.

Andrew Radford is a Lecturer in Anglo-American Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has published extensively on modernist fiction and is the co-editor of Franco-British Cultural Exchanges: Channel Packets.

Heather Walton is Professor of Theology and Creative Practice and Co-Director of the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her books include: Literature, Theology and Feminism, Imagining Theology: Women Writing and God and Not Eden: Spiritual Life Writing for this World. She is Executive Editor of the journal Literature and Theology.