Women's Writing and Mission in the Nineteenth Century: Jane Eyre's Missionary Sisters

by Angharad Eyre

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032366227
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/30/2022
Series:	The Nineteenth Century Series
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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.

Table 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