Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality

"A collection of breathtaking range and variety, this book includes provocative new readings among its original chapters which pore over, interrogate, and establish the fact that modernist women writers were genuinely invested in spiritual quests. Founded on an emerging, impressive body of new research (often archival), this book makes a fresh, original, and substantial contribution to the study of the topos of spirituality as understood and practiced by modernist women writers. I strongly recommend it." (Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, Professor of English, University of New Brunswick, Canada)

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 a vital role in their lives and writing.