Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality - eBooks

Edited by elizabeth anderson, andrew radford, and

heather walton

Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality

A Piercing Darkness

Andrew Radford • Heather Walton • Elizabeth AndersonEditors


A Piercing Darkness

ISBN 978-1-137-53035-6 ISBN 978-1-137-53036-3 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. LondonThe registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

EditorsAndrew RadfordUniversity of GlasgowGlasgow, UK

Elizabeth AndersonUniversity of StirlingStirling, UK

Heather WaltonUniversity of GlasgowGlasgow, UK

v

This book emerged from a symposium on Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality held at the University of Stirling in May 2014. The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the School of Arts and Humanities and the Division of Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling. We would also like to thank Andrew Miller, Tom Kowalski and Juanita Green and her colleagues at the Iris Murdoch Building.

The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies provided publicity assis-tance, and particular thanks are due to Matthew Creasy (University of Glasgow).

The Palgrave external reader who read our original proposal and sam-ple chapter offered searching and subtle feedback regarding the scope of the project. Finally, we gratefully thank the Society of Authors as the liter-ary representative of the estate of Virginia Woolf for permission to quote from the Monks House Papers.

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: The Intricate Persistence of Strange Gods 1Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Walton

Radical Unorthodoxy: Religious and Literary Modernisms in H.D. and Mary Butts 21Suzanne Hobson

Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn Underhill, the Subliminal Consciousness and Spiritual Direction 39Jamie Callison

Stevie Smith’s Serious Play: A Modernist Reframing of Christian Orthodoxy 55Gillian Boughton

Faith in Ruins: Fragments and Pattern in the Late Works of Rose Macaulay 69Heather Walton

Jane Harrison’s Ritual Scholarship 95Mimi Winick

contents

viii CONTENTS

Antiquarian Magic: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Theory and Hope Mirrlees’s Antiquarianism in Paris 115Nina Enemark

Childish Things: Spirituality, Materiality and Creativity in Mary Butts’s The Crystal Cabinet 135Elizabeth Anderson

Spectral Poetics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves 153Sheela Banerjee

The Queer Movements of Ecstasy and Asceticism in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul and Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists 169Ellen Ricketts

Dora Marsden and the “WORLD-INCLUSIVE I”: Egoism, Mysticism and Radical Feminism 185Steven Quincey-Jones

What Lies Below the Horizon of Life: The Occult Fiction of Dion Fortune 201Andrew Radford

What Words Conceal: H.D.’s Occult Word-Alchemy in the 1950s 219Matte Robinson

Afterword: Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality 237Lara Vetter

Bibliography 247

Index 273

ix

Elizabeth Anderson is a research fellow at the University of Stirling. She is the author of H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination (Bloomsbury 2013). Her current work involves modernist women writers, spirituality and material culture.

Sheela Banerjee is a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is completing her monograph, The Modernist Ghost: The Supernatural Aesthetic of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Gillian Boughton has taught in the University of Durham since 1994 and is cur-rently teaching and writing as an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion and a Fellow of St John’s College, Durham. Her interests lie in main-stream English literature engaging with agnosticism and theological modernism from around 1880 to 1940.

Jamie Callison is a PhD research fellow on the “Modernism and Christianity” project at the University of Bergen and the University of Northampton. He also holds a research fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. His thesis is entitled: “Converting Modernism: Mystical Revival, Christian Late Modernism and the Long Religious Poem in T.S. Eliot and David Jones.”

Nina Enemark recently received her PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on the modernist engagement with myth and ritual, specializing in the work of Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison.

Suzanne Hobson is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–60 (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and co-editor of The Salt

notes on contributors

x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Companion to Mina Loy (Salt 2010). She has published widely on the topic of religion and modernism and is currently working on a project about unbelief in fiction between the wars.

Steven Quincey-Jones teaches in the School of English and Drama and works as a researcher for the Centre for Poetry at Queen Mary University of London. His PhD thesis considered the impact of egoism on the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Herbert Read, and he is currently preparing a chapter for publication on Read’s egoist roots.

Andrew Radford lectures on twentieth-century and contemporary Anglo-American literature at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the co-editor of Franco-British Cultural Exchanges: Channel Packets (Palgrave, 2012). He has con-tributed a range of articles and book reviews to Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts and the Journal of American Studies. He is currently researching the life and experimental fiction of the interwar author Olive Moore.

Ellen Ricketts is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Hull and is com-pleting her thesis on the rise of the lesbian Bildungsroman from 1915 to 1928. Her article “The Fractured Pageant: Queering Lesbian Lives in the Early Twentieth Century” was published in 2015 through Peer English, and she is the author of an additional forthcoming publication on the subject of lesbian literature in the early twentieth century.

Matte Robinson is Assistant Professor at St Thomas University, Fredericton, where he teaches American literature specializing in modernism. His recent publications include The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose and a co-edited scholarly edition of H.D.’s Hirslanden Notebooks.

Lara Vetter is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches modernism, poetry and American literature. She is the author of Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer, editor of H.D.’s By Avon River, and co- editor of Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose and Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences.

Heather Walton is Professor of Theology and Creative Practice at the University of Glasgow and Co-director of the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts. Her works include: Not Eden (SCM Press, 2015), Literature, Theology and Feminism (MUP, 2014), Writing Methods in Theological Reflection (SCM Press, 2014) and Imagining Theology: Women, Writing and God (T and T Clark: 2007). She is Executive Editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) journal Literature and Theology.

Mimi Winick is a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University. Her disserta-tion, “Studied Enchantment: Historical Fiction, Comparative Religion, and the Imaginative Use of Scholarship in Britain, 1862–1941”, explores scholarship as an agent of enchantment in British literary culture.

1© The Author(s) 2016E. Anderson et al. (eds.), Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_1

Introduction: The Intricate Persistence of Strange Gods

Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Walton

E. Anderson (*) University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

A. Radford • H. Walton University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Montaigne”, represents the “soul” as “all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action” (Woolf 1929, 56). Attempts by Woolf and other female authors to map the “soul” as the essence of being reveal dynamic tensions between main-stream institutional religion and women’s felt sensation, so throwing into relief critically overlooked intersections of sexual difference, cultural cre-ativity and mystical perception. Hope Mirrlees, whose experimental poem Paris (1920) was published as a slim booklet by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, scrutinizes these correspondences through the lens of Jane Ellen Harrison’s feminist classicism. This act had potentially crucial implications for the women’s movement at a time that many feminist public intellec-tuals interpreted as a new Hellenistic Age when numerous orthodoxies (as well as heresies and heterodoxies) were subject to flux (see Koulouris 2013).

Such turbulence is not only apparent in avant-garde women’s writ-ing: the female protagonist with a deeply conflicted attitude to the estab-lished church recurs in the middlebrow fiction of Rose Macaulay, Dorothy Whipple, E.M. Delafield, E.H. Young and Antonia White. For the angrily

sceptical Emily Herrick in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s 1925 novel Pastors and Masters, the Christian God has such “a superior, vindictive and over- indulgent [personality]. He is one of the best drawn characters in fiction” (Compton-Burnett 1952, 32). In Vera Brittain’s family saga Honourable Estate (1936), Janet Rutherston, recognizing “the complete powerless-ness of her sex within the church,” finds spiritual solace in campaigning for women’s rights (Brittain 2000, 55; Ingman 2004, 78). No such solace awaits Ingeborg in Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife (1914), whose experience of “becoming religious” is defined by the fretful tedium of child-rearing. She acquiesces in her own domestic defeat: “she was ceas-ing to criticize or to ask Why? […] The more anaemic she grew the easier religion seemed to be” (von Arnim 1914, 189).

Popular authors such as Margery Lawrence, Dion Fortune, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Dorothy Macardle employed Gothic subgenres—such as the “psychic detective” tale—to dramatize spiritual experience. Occultism emerges as a vibrant practice and its distinct epistemology conditions the cosmic plots of H.D. Notions of a “sacralized sexology”—found in the fiction of Christopher St John and Radclyffe Hall—function as narrative strategies and ideologies inflecting queer subjectivities, creative economies and friendship networks (see Winick 2014).

The authors featured in these chapters delineate the spiritual realm as an intricately layered conceptual and affective space, shifting between poles of the sanctified and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the materialist and the magical, the conventional and the dissident (see Ingman 2010). Whether they are reappraising Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist or arcane credos, these authors supply remarkably original accounts of the role of religion in shaping the Western cultural imaginary.

Standard surveys of aesthetic modernism situate myriad women writers in open revolt against a male-centred religious cosmology founded upon dualistic modes of viewing and construing the world (West 1982, 211–14). God and Christ are presented as profoundly “other” patriarchal deities, and orthodox theology presupposes the interventions of male exegetes whose principal aim is conversion and control (see Sorin and Lux-Sterritt 2011). It is certainly true that some of our primary authors espouse the radical scepticism and secular scientific worldview that sought to over-haul doctrinal codes. But our contributors also demonstrate the vigorous appropriation and re-visioning of orthodox religion. What mars otherwise amply detailed studies of this subject, such as Joy Dixon’s Divine Feminine (2001), is a tendency to treat alternative or seditious feminist spirituality

2 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

with more academic rigour than the historical and established forms of religion—such as Anglicanism or British evangelicalism—which are seen to be implicated in the stifling of women’s expressive potentialities. One of our goals is to complicate and nuance this interpretation by showing how women’s writing addresses the dogma, divinity and mystery of Christian theology. Indeed, Erik Tonning asserts that “the role of Christianity is intrinsic to any coherent account of modernism” (Tonning 2014, 1). The published work of Naomi Mitchison, Rebecca West and Winifred Holtby evokes orthodox religion as a fund for the communal symbolic imagina-tion and portrays a noteworthy range of mystical encounters and animistic “intimations”. These authors argue that Christianity, far from smothering their own creative aspirations, furnishes a substantial “body of traditional legend and lore, to serve us in metaphor […] to provide us with that shorthand of symbolism which tells us what we want to know by a single reference” (Holtby 1930, 111).

Our book reveals that modernist women writers frequently approach religion as voluntary exiles, wayfarers, nomads and seekers rather than set-tlers, and yet celebrate the togetherness of a congregation as much as indi-vidual odyssey (Ingman 2004; Joannou 2013). Their pluralistic and often combatively iconoclastic approaches—targeting grossly unequal class and gender relations for example—try to make theology fully reflective of human experience and relevant to the demands of active citizenship. Moreover, the contributing authors to this book are part of a welcome move to address mystical–aesthetic attitudes, beliefs and emotions in terms of networks of cultural collaboration and exchange. In the much- discussed novels of prominent authors such as Woolf as well as the recently recovered Mary Butts and Hope Mirrlees, spirituality could be an austere discipline, a prophetic revelation, a jarring encounter or a narrative tactic that was by no means set apart from the public controversies of interwar modernity. At the core of Jane Harrison’s anthropological search for fresh numinous vistas and multiplied perceptions is not a distant patriarchal God, but the immanent, incarnate or internalized “Great Goddess” (see Garrity 2003). That such a divinity epitomizes a “true form of worship” is apparent in Rebecca West’s stylistically hybrid New Woman novel The Judge (1922), especially through its rapt evocation of a pagan landscape whose temenoi are “older than Stonehenge” (West 1980, 410, 233). This anticipates the feminist vitalism and Wordsworthian epiphanies explored in West’s short essay “My Religion” (1926), St Augustine (1933), Letter to a Grandfather (1933) and “I Believe” (1939). Paying closer attention

INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 3

to such formulations dramatically alters our assessment of how spirituality was depicted, debated and popularized at this time of civic and political ferment.

Spirituality and religion in the early twentieth Century

In The Secret Doctrine (1888), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, spirit-medium and co-founder of the Theosophical Society, rails against the coarsen-ing, profit-driven industries of mass culture where “all is doubt, nega-tion, iconoclasm and brutal indifference”. In “our age of the hundred ‘isms’ and no religion”, she concludes that “every idol is broken save the Golden Calf” (qtd. in Kolocotroni et al. 1998, 32). This volume contests and reframes Blavatsky’s despairing diagnosis by showing that discourses about the invisible and transcendent dimensions of lived experience per-meated the cultural imaginary at the fin de siècle and beyond. Rebecca West’s 1933 psychobiography of St Augustine broods over the links between a “work of art”, which is “an expression of the consciousness of the universe at a particular moment”, and “religion”, which “aims at the analysis of all experience”, the “consciousness of the universe through all time” (West 1933, 52). Winifred Holtby, in her mordantly witty tract Eutychus or the Future of the Pulpit (1928), insists that—contrary to some recent accounts of an interwar culture shaped by a “fatal spread” of scep-ticism in all “matters religious” (Engels 2006, 9)—never has “interest in religion been so intense, so widespread, so intelligent, and so active as it is to-day” (Holtby 1928, 37). In addition to the bewildering array of creeds available—Christian Science, the British Israelites, the Salvation Army—Holtby’s text shows that even an ostensibly secular association like the Girl Guides has a spiritual constitution, “with ritual, songs, traditions, and authority” (Holtby 1928, 51–2). What unites all these confedera-cies, according to Holtby, is an inspired curiosity, “driving [humankind] to seek explanations of the universe, to learn whence he has come and whither he goes” (Holtby 1928, 52).

May Sinclair also marvelled at how the numinous “seems to be approaching a rather serious revival” at the “present day” (Sinclair 1917, 251). Yet as Sinclair’s biographer Suzanne Raitt concedes, mysticism is “one of modernism’s dominant—and in literary circles most neglected—movements” (Raitt 2000, 233). Readers can consult a plethora of titles


devoted to the meanings and behaviours synonymous with nineteenth- century spirituality, both arcane and orthodox. Sarah Willburn’s Possessed Victorians (2006), Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment (2007), Marlene Tromp’s Altered States (2007), Jill Galvan’s The Sympathetic Medium (2010), Kontou and Willburn, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth Century Spiritualism and the Occult (2012) and Christine Ferguson’s Determined Spirits (2012) are all thoughtful and thought-provoking studies that ponder the divergent ontologies of materialist sciences of vision and “second sight”. However, there are far fewer academic resources available to textual scholars concerned with women’s writing and mysticism in the first half of the twentieth century. Matthew Sterenberg’s Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain (2014), Miriam Wallraven’s Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture (2015) and Scott Freer’s Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods (2015) react to the analytical neglect by setting forth how the unseen and the recondite returned in very specific forms: in a resurgence of interest in non-denominational spirituality, Indian and Tibetan lore, classical and Egyptian mythology, hermetic theory and practice, and psy-chic phenomena. Ultimately Sterenberg, like Suzanne Hobson in Angels of Modernism (2011), demonstrates how cultural production from this epoch mirrors the highly “complex and variegated pattern of belief and unbelief which more accurately characterizes modernism’s ‘religion’ than the old disenchanted version” (Hobson 2011, 5).

Our chosen period was an era of European empire, in which the totems showcased at imperial museums and colonial exhibitions—such as the 1893 “World’s Parliament of Religions” held in Chicago—prompted learned visitors to cultivate what John Bramble calls a malleable and open- ended “East-West syncretism” (Bramble 2015, 1–2). Some of the most incisive contributors to the “religion-making imagination” at this tran-sitional point in cultural history were Anglo-American women writers (Bramble 2015, 143–4). By the early 1900s, the Theosophical Society was directed by charismatic and publicly active women who viewed strin-gent spiritual enquiry and civic reform as inextricably meshed. For the actress, intellectual maverick and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Florence Farr, feminism was to be melded with antinomian spirituality in order to reinvigorate the political landscape as a site of self-transformation (see Wallraven 2015, 1–60). Farr’s eye-catching rhetoric of immanentism found an apt forum in A.R. Orage’s widely influential weekly magazine The New Age, in which she proposed that the Gnostic


“state of consciousness, now identified by leading modern thinkers” as belonging to the “Hero-Aristocrat”, is actually “mystically feminine” (Farr 1907, 62; Jackson 2012).

the QueStion of ModerniSM

From the scholarship of Jane Harrison and Evelyn Underhill in the 1900s and 1910s to the poetry and narrative prose fiction of H.D. and Rose Macaulay in the 1950s, our volume canvasses a generically various range of writing and endorses the argument for the persistence of modernism beyond its conventional end point of the early 1940s (see Detloff 2009). We follow Roger Griffin who commends a major rethink and expan-sion of “the semantic field of ‘modernism’”—prioritizing visual and ver-bal texts, phenomena and artefacts ostensibly “unrelated to the radical innovation in the arts it normally connotes” (Griffin, in Bramble 2015, ix–xii). This is an especially worthwhile intervention because a number of the women writers scrutinized in our volume do not fit into what we might call the “authorized version” of the modernist canon. So Griffin’s readiness to apply conceptual pressure to disciplinary definitions of mod-ernism is welcome. It invites us first of all to interrogate the sometimes glib narratives rival pundits foster to explain the literary production of the early and middle years of the twentieth century. But it also prompts us to advance a more expansive idea of “modernism”, one that not only points to those possibilities of aggressive “self-expression and style”, associated with avant-gardists such as Woolf, Eliot, Pound and Joyce to subvert hide-bound narrative forms. We are, like Griffin, more struck by modernism as a process of urgent existential enquiry in a secular age profoundly affected by centuries of Christian philosophy; even a quest for a “transcendent communal and individual purpose” that appealed as much to the vanguard experimentalist as it did to the mainstream campaigner for the democrati-zation of traditional rites like pilgrimage, and the localities in which they took place (Griffin, in Bramble 2015, ix–xii).

The chapters in this volume productively test and enlarge the semantic resonance of modernism by charting the range, magnitude and partic-ularity of women writers’ construction of a “mystically feminine” con-sciousness, as well as the complex and contradictory standpoints that they occupied in relation, for example, to Christian dogma and ceremonial. The eminent concert pianist Katherine Ruth Heyman, referred to as “the american lady, K.H” in Ezra Pound’s Canto 76, and who appears in less


flattering light as Miss Stamberg in H.D.’s roman-à-clef HERmione, not only introduced Pound to the ideas of Swedenborg and the Theosophists, but sought through her theoretical writing to equate the mythic, pre- colonial past and the ultramodern. Many of the women writers explored here reveal—to adapt the words of Constantin Brâncusi—that a “new I” or a “new age” derives from “something” numinous which is “very old” (Lipsey 1988, 242–46). This emphasis on a primal and perennial vision furnishes a more intricate view of a pre-Great War period that George Bernard Shaw notoriously mocked as a lamentable “drift to the abyss”, with its trivializing dilettantism and naïve relish for “table-rapping, clair-voyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like” (qtd. in Katz 2007, 121; Bramble 2015).

While acknowledging canonical figures such as Woolf, our volume also privileges many unfairly neglected or misrepresented female authors whose published work evinces a thorough engagement with spirituality—from modes of orthodox theology at home to esoteric concepts framed as geographically remote. Scholarly debate surrounding women writers and their exact relation to what Wassily Kandinsky hoped would be an eman-cipatory “epoch of the great spiritual” has generated contexts for closer analysis including: feminist classicism and theology; literary, socio-political and religious history; queer and trauma theory, as well as psychoanaly-sis. Heather Ingman’s Women’s Spirituality in the Twentieth Century: An Exploration through Fiction (2004) and Maren Tova Linett’s Modernism, Feminism and Jewishness (2010) respond to what Ann Braude terms the “academic tone-deafness to religion” in this era (Braude 2001, xxi) by probing some of these research topics. Linett posits that female modern-ists frequently exploited Judaism as a foil when refining their own numi-nous insights. Linett’s research has proven especially fruitful in relation to Dorothy Richardson, who emerges as a seminal author in the con-text of interwar debates about Quakerism, Judaism and gendered sub-jectivity. Such work has been acknowledged variously in Erik Tonning’s Modernism and Christianity (2014), John Bramble’s Modernism and the Occult (2015) and Leigh Wilson’s Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (2012).1 Tonning, like Pericles Lewis in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2012), effectively debunks the reductive “secularization thesis” that once dominated mod-ernist historiography. A lively interdisciplinary approach permits Lewis, Wilson and Tonning to explore how modernist authors used literary and scientific discourses to delineate religious experience in often unexpected


ways. Moreover, as Roger Griffin posits, the search for “hidden peren-nial truths in art and occultism can both be seen as modernist experi-ments in the re-enchantment of the world” (Griffin in Bramble 2015, xii). Such academic endeavour demonstrates that the relationship between aesthetic modernism and spirituality is bracingly dialogic rather than bit-terly adversarial.

The key problem with some of these otherwise searching projects is that they undervalue a vast body of avant-garde, as well as mainstream and middlebrow, writing by interwar female authors, many of whom implicitly endorsed Nietzsche’s thesis, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), that a civi-lized culture cannot survive—let alone thrive—if it is blind to “a horizon ringed about by myths” (qtd. in Pasley 1978, 13). Though these compan-ion publications say much about literary inscriptions of metaphysical dis-course, our chapters probe Lewis’s wide-ranging deployment of the term “religious experience”. Lewis, perhaps wary of furnishing a too narrow taxonomy of such affect, states only that he lends the term the most flexi-ble resonance so as to house its legion manifestations in aesthetic modern-ism. But their frequent deployment in Lewis’s monograph demands, if not forensically exact definitions, then at least some cautious and methodical usage. As our contributors suggest, there has to be some signal difference to a “religious” reality in order for this analytic category to be corralled from other types of encounter, occurrence, attitude or perception.

Our volume also aims for greater generic diversity in primary materials. We canvass intellectual interchange and aesthetic creation across narra-tive prose fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, investigative journalism, the polemical treatise, the anthropology of religion and life writing. At times women writers appraise emerging and disputed modes of belief by reframing late Victorian fictional devices, so contributing to popular liter-ary subgenres such as the theosophical novel. Literature was an important site of exploration in a context in which most other public theological arenas were closed to women (even those, such as Jane Harrison and Evelyn Underhill, who pursued more academic work did not follow the traditional career trajectories of their male peers). Disputes surrounding heretical epistemologies in women’s writing, as well as traditional and even conservative modes of mainstream religious systems, illuminate a fresh critical landscape for feminist literary historians of modernism.

Common scholarly issues and questions contour all these chapters, which register and move across such boundaries as those implied by the umbrella terms “late Victorian”, “Edwardian” and “modernist”. Our con-


tributors gauge women writers’ endeavours variously to integrate spiritual and psychological growth; scrutinize and seek out challenges to the tra-ditional religious and political establishment of the era; and excavate and engage with orthodox dogma and practice. The chapters ask what compo-nents of a modernist text count as clear evidence of a syncretic spirituality? How do these authors craft a literary lexicon necessary for the refinement of a new cosmology in their narratives? Is spirituality a fund of existential comfort, a route into supportive networking circuits, or a trigger for bold intellectual debate? And what do these texts reveal about their authors’ ideological, affective and ethical perspectives? At what point and for what reasons do some authors re-invest in orthodox religious practices?

At this stage, it is pertinent to note the differences between literary modernism and the theological modernism which was an influential movement during the period of our study. A number of the women writ-ers represented here (e.g. Underhill, Smith, Macaulay) were sympathetic to aspects of the demythologizing and reforming project of theological modernism. However, none wished to see religion accommodated so as to become credible and palatable to contemporary tastes. They were less motivated by a desire to express spiritual truths in a manner acceptable to “modern man” than by a compulsion to acknowledge the penetrating power of an abiding mystery.

We chose the subtitle of this volume, a piercing darkness, to highlight a spiritual quest that attends to the unheimlich and acknowledges the stub-born strangeness of the sacred. This is not a quest for rational illumination but a journey towards the veiled depth of things. If light and glory are mem-orably utilized to express the coming of the Lord in Isaiah 60: 19–22—a piercing of the darkness—then our primary authors often laud, foreground and feminize what D.H. Lawrence phrased “the dark gods” in his novel The Lost Girl (1920). These divinities evoke Virginia Woolf’s conception of “the dark places of psychology” (Woolf 1929, 45), her sense of revelatory experience as “matches struck in the dark” (Woolf 1992c, 235), as well as Richard Ellmann’s notion of the modernist pilgrim-author who traverses “the night world”—an “almost totally unexplored expanse” of hypnago-gic states (Ellmann 1982, 716). More importantly, the “dark gods” speak to, and about, those crepuscular, haunted or occluded states of being that exercise such a binding fascination in many of the key texts considered here. Indeed, the piercing darkness implies that a woman writer’s declarations of “faith” might appear “to some” supposedly enlightened male observers—to


adopt the terms of Rebecca West’s Letter to a Grandfather—as studied irreverence, even “unfaith” (West 1933, 43).

Quotidian MyStiCiSM

Our contributors note that spirituality is a capacious category of histori-cal experience that comprehends personal and corporate intimations of the divine. Existing academic scholarship proves that more subtle liter-ary–critical frameworks are required to calibrate revelations of numinous insight. We need to revisit how women writers registered the shock of the old—creeds, cultural artefacts and institutions—by promoting novel genealogies or oppositional models of belief. Recent interpretations of the “mystical” for example—as a fraught reaction to the crisis of a dis-enchanted modernity, as the vestige of symbolist tenets, as unreasoning immersion in subconscious drives—do scant justice to women writers who depict the numinous not as a retrograde force but as something felt in energizing material practices. In Paris, Hope Mirrlees endeavours to re- sacralize a tangible locality by presenting a vivid “journey in a circadian framework of the quotidian” (Young 2013, 278). What if, in Vincent Van Gogh’s words, “a new religion” or “something completely new which will be nameless” could be forged not by conserving the geographically distant, but by evoking the press of domestic or inner-city life (Van Gogh, in Bramble 2015, xi)?2

In this regard the mystical, as Evelyn Underhill portrays it in her novel The Column of Dust (1909), is a discourse of the palpable, mun-dane universe that celebrates the potencies, foibles and flaws of the cor-poreal, rather than something inescapably fused with the transcendent. This is underlined by May Sinclair’s The Helpmate (1907), which debunks William Blake’s famously gloomy tropes of humdrum routine—the “same dull round over again”—by depicting regular human activity as a sphere of affective opportunity, even ceremonial restoration. In this novel Edith senses “divine spirit” flowing through “the blood and into the chambers of the heart, moving mortal things to immortality. She saw that there is no spirituality worthy of the name that has not been proven in the house of flesh” (Sinclair 1907, 426–7). For the eponymous protagonist of Sinclair’s later novel Mary Olivier (1919), there is grace in the daily; it “stream[s] in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life” (Sinclair 1980, 377). These texts variously intimate the holiness of homely things and processes, enabling the woman writer to achieve—in Storm Jameson’s


words—a balance between the dizzying “speed of daily life and the mind’s ability to grasp it, to linger over an event, an action, long enough to turn it into something our nerves can assimilate” (Jameson 1936, 140).

Many of our contributors forcefully illustrate that women’s writing from this period depicts mysticism as a means of confronting, rather than side-stepping or negating, the divisions, dilemmas and injustices that marked contemporary political culture (see West 1982, 211–14). This confronta-tion frequently requires articulation by recourse to secular rationalism as well as recondite lore. For Annie Besant, Mary Butts, May Sinclair and Dion Fortune, a deeper and more enduring truth seems accessible, not by shunning the cutting-edge new findings synonymous with anthropology, mathematics and the physical sciences, but by blending—as Lara Vetter’s recent account shows—empirical and metaphysical concepts or proce-dures (Vetter 2010).3 In her 1900 occult autobiography, Emma Hardinge Britten seeks to demonstrate the veracity and reliability of her heightened perceptions by reference to “an immense array” of scientific “test facts given all over the world” (Britten 1999, 249–50; Wallraven 2015, 97). Dion Fortune posits in her interwar essays that “occult science, rightly understood, is the link between psychology and religion; it gives the means of a spiritual approach to science, and a scientific approach to the spiritual life” (Fortune 1925, 375). Likewise, Evelyn Underhill shapes a distinctly modernist approach to religious tropes and concerns by parsing orthodox Christian phenomena through the prism of specialized scientific learning.

ModerniSt woMen writerS and Spirituality

This volume necessarily represents a selection of writers, texts and genres, rather than an exhaustive overview of the great diversity of relevant mate-rial from the first half of the twentieth century. In drawing together these chapters, we are acutely aware that further research on women’s cultural expression remains to be done and we could have included myriad other authors—Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Townsend Warner, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, the list goes on. However, we hope that in surveying a wide range of narrative modes and styles—from the aca-demic nonfiction prose of Jane Harrison and Evelyn Underhill to the memoirs of Mary Butts, from the realist novels of Christopher St John and Rose Macaulay to the experimental fiction of Virginia Woolf, from Stevie Smith’s animal poems to H.D.’s occult epics—we provide a stimu-lating sample of work in this emerging field. Our aim is to provoke further


questions and fresh analyses rather than to furnish a conclusive reading of spirituality in modernist women’s writing.

In the opening chapter, Suzanne Hobson examines H.D.’s and Mary Butts’s fictions of the ancient world against the background of the mod-ernist crisis in the Catholic and Anglican Churches. The Hellenistic Age is contested ground in this quarrel, claimed by some as the eclipse of the Golden Age of Olympian religion and by others as the dawning of a new epoch of world Christianity. H.D. and Butts follow the example of George Moore and D.H. Lawrence, among others, in providing an account of this age that is also a thinly veiled chronicle of their own times. Both H.D. and Butts were influenced by the Cambridge Ritualists and held an abiding interest in the relevance of comparative anthropology of religion to the writing of literature; H.D.’s Moravian childhood gave her a keen fascina-tion with the narratives and rituals of Christianity, while Butts continued to study pagan lore through her conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in the early 1930s. This chapter asks how these writers operate at the border-lines of orthodoxy and heresy in their stories and how, in particular, they approach the still vexed question of women’s place in Christianity.

Jamie Callison, in “Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn Underhill, the Subliminal Consciousness and Spiritual Direction”, appraises Evelyn Underhill’s signal contribution to twentieth-century mysticism. Outlining an alternative trajectory for modernist spirituality to that traced in Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010), Callison proposes that modernist religious thought, far from playing heir to the long march of secularization, was in fact conditioned by a late-nineteenth- century cultural crisis that issued in a range of religious experiments and renewals, one of which was Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911), a text that not only brought together mystical traditions and scientific discoveries, but also used this interdisciplinary remit to counter existing secularizing perspec-tives. An important dimension of Underhill’s research was its collaborative nature; it offers, Callison concludes, not access to rarefied enlightenment, but rather a means of navigating treacherous religious terrain.

In “Stevie Smith’s Serious Play: A Modernist Reframing of Christian Orthodoxy”, Gillian Boughton traces the trajectory of Stevie Smith’s complex sense of “heresy” in terms of a retrospective appraisal of Anglican “theological modernism” between the late 1920s and 1940s. This reformist intellectual project explored the teachings of the historical Jesus while challenging the Virgin Birth narrative, nature miracles and bodily


resurrection. Influential and erudite modernist theologians, such as W.R. Inge, and the ethical philosopher Hastings Rashdall sought to uphold critical scrutiny of the Bible, and to revitalize Christianity by bringing it into line with modern facets of knowledge, especially evolu-tionary concepts (see Phillips 1996, 29–30). Smith’s poetry, fiction and book reviews, having enjoyed a popular following during her lifetime but eluding sustained textual analysis, are increasingly attracting academic attention. Virago’s decision to reprint Smith’s novels in 1979–1980 brought, as William May notes, her complete corpus of work “into print for the first time” and prompted scholars to revisit Smith’s authorial self-presentation, with its often challenging blend of unfettered mischief and pithy, ironic sophistication (May 2010, 90). The year 2002 saw the 100th anniversary of Smith’s birth, as well as the reissue of Frances Spalding’s searching 1988 biography. The first academic conference on Smith’s oeu-vre took place in Oxford in March 2016. While the conference focused on Smith’s exact relation to the “middlebrow”, visual culture, her Victorian forebears, and questions of poetic form—especially the withering mockery which is a hallmark of her suburban and domestic satires—Smith’s ener-getic engagement with religious controversies also merits closer scrutiny and is, Boughton argues, more prevalent and nuanced than literary his-torians realize. Smith’s often impish and eloquent dissent from Christian orthodoxy permeates her poetry, narrative prose fiction and occasional as well as polemical essays. Yet for all its vigorous eccentricity and wily manipulation of stylistic register—shifting between hymnals, liturgy and nursery rhyme—Smith’s theological stance is in some respects reminiscent of scholarly Broad Church enquiries, especially Matthew Arnold’s liberal stress on the poetry of the Christian religion and its benefits for civil soci-ety. Boughton concludes that Smith departs from Arnold and his acolytes in her development of an empathetic and ardent orthodoxy. She reinvents and voices the character of God and of animals in a surprising way but one that is consistent with a Christian view of the integrity of creation.

In“Faith in Ruins: Fragments and Pattern in the Late Works of Rose Macaulay” Heather Walton addresses a radical spiritual indeterminacy present throughout the work of Rose Macaulay and the way in which this is manifested through the recurring tropes of androgyny, amphibious life and ruins. These literary devices enable Macaulay to present a bifur-cated vision of faith and identity that is troubling to many of her Christian critics who wish to present Macaulay as a spiritual seeker who eventually found a secure home within the Church. Although textual scholars have


celebrated her ambivalent and polyvalent writing, they have been less willing to acknowledge its religious elements. Through a reading of Macaulay’s later work, Walton emphasizes the spiritual significance of her literary and personal decision to dwell among the ruins of faith.

In “Jane Harrison’s Ritual Scholarship”, Mimi Winick documents how early-twentieth-century Britain saw a flowering of scholarly writing on religious thought and practice by women, from Newnham Classicist Jane Harrison’s Themis (1912) through medievalist Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), to Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Murray’s The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921). Winick proposes that Jane Harrison’s writing on the archaic myth-making Greek constitutes a modernist project to create a new version of a very old religious experi-ence. Harrison took Victorian theories of religion centred on the decline of faith and reworked them to insist on, and celebrate, religion’s persis-tence into the twentieth century. Linking religion’s increasing prominence with that of women, she claimed a parallel between her present moment and the ancient Greek world of goddess worship she described in her clas-sical studies. In these, Harrison further elaborated an understanding of religion grounded in ritual and mystical experience. In modernist studies, Harrison’s work has largely been judged as a paratext to other, more liter-ary, works. Through focusing on Harrison’s texts as a modernist project in its own right, Winick demonstrates that Harrison’s scholarly volumes act as sacred texts of this feminist, post-theological religion, and in them scholarship itself comes to offer a peculiarly modern form of ritual practice.

In her Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (1925), Jane Harrison discusses “ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like this that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see mov-ing darker and older shapes” (Harrison 1925, 45). The “patina of age” implies an interest in concrete particularities, the timeworn, the storied and the haptic that Hope Mirrlees also demonstrates in her technically ambitious poem Paris (1920), which is the subject of Nina Enemark’s chapter Antiquarian Magic: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Theory and Hope Mirrlees’s Antiquarianism in Paris4 Paris is, according to Julia Briggs, “a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition”, which preceded Eliot’s The Waste Land, a text similarly resistant to the traditional rubrics of “lyric form” (Briggs, qtd. in Joannou 2012, 2). Like her histori-cal novel and roman-à-clef Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists—published


in 1919 and discussed by Ellen Ricketts in “The Queer Movements of Ecstasy and Asceticism in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul and Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists”—Paris reveals Mirrlees’s deep knowledge of the French capital, its cultural coteries, tangled history and topogra-phy. Whereas Madeleine is set completely in seventeenth- century France and portrays the claustrophobic interiors of the salon, Paris renders the colourful externals of the modern metropolis. After the publication of Madeleine and Paris, Mirrlees was hailed by the critic R. Brimley Johnson, in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920), as an adroit exponent of “the new Realism”—searching after a “new vision – cutting away all that chokes the soul” (Johnson 1920, xxv). By the second half of the twentieth century, however, Mirrlees was, in Matthew Mitton’s words, “just like the other satellite female poets who orbited the outer reaches of Bloomsbury […] not quite dead, but voiceless” (Mitton 2013, 368). Yet with her serpentine tonal and syntactic oddities, collage of dissimilar stylistic registers—inviting comparison with the Cubist tenets of Braque—and her alertness to “the haste and hurry of the modern street” (Harrison 1913, 237), the punning and polyglot Mirrlees is not like “other satellite female poets” at all.5 Her synthesis of verbal textures and hierarchies, visu-ally striking catalogue of adverts in myriad font sizes, not only aligns Paris with the continental vanguard of Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, but makes it a harbinger of recent “process-poetry”.

Enemark situates Mirrlees as a pioneering author for whom Jane Harrison’s explication of the matriarchal, chthonic and ceremonial prov-enance of much Hellenistic myth was of central importance. Harrison’s validation of sensuous immediacy colours Mirrlees’s distinctive brand of imaginative archaeology. Paris charts a quasi-mythic, zig-zag “pilgrimage” through the eponymous city on a single day; we follow the speaker from the Metro, through the Tuileries, and eventually, at evening, back to her apartment on “the top floor of an old Hotel”. Paris has been construed as a thought-adventure in which the roving speaker pierces the crust of a gaudy yet enticing post–Great War Paris—with its crowded jazz clubs, Sapphic subcultures and marketing billboards—to recuperate forgotten pagan energies associated with the metropolis as a former Roman settle-ment and locus of sacred rites. As Patrick McGuinness observes, Mirrlees’s poem relishes, rather than repudiates, “the siren song of consumerism, the closeness of advertising to art, of publicity slogans to poetry” (McGuinness 2012, 15). Her visionary cadence and elaborate “intertextual ghostings” (Mitton 2013, 369) hold parallels with the interwar short stories of Mary


Butts. The latter’s neo-Gothic chronicle of Parisian highbrow salons and cafés—for example, in “Mappa Mundi” and “From Altar to Chimney- Piece”—evokes the French culture capital as a zone of beguiling ambigu-ity, situated “between the cocktail and the crucifix / Between the prayer and the fear” (Butts 1973, 141).6 What makes Mirrlees’s Paris unique however is her desire not only to express a disjointed yet intense numi-nous encounter through the eyes of a flâneuse: she imparts it to posterity through the poem’s performative structure and finely crafted materiality. Enemark’s appraisal of Mirrlees reveals the powerfully dislocating poten-tial of the historical particular and the diurnal in formulations of modern-ist creative engagement with spirituality.

Then Elizabeth Anderson analyses “Childish Things: Spirituality, Materiality and Creativity in Mary Butts’s The Crystal Cabinet”. Anderson returns to a subject of the first chapter, the under-researched author Mary Butts, whose experimental fiction and life-writing consider the spiritual significance of landscape, the relevance of Greek and Celtic paganism for the modern world and the resources of ritual and pilgrimage for structur-ing literary works. Anderson focuses on Butts’s posthumously published memoir, a text replete with objects that speak of affective and spiritual realities. Butts’s animistic understanding resonates with romantic modern-ism, pagan pantheism and incarnational theology as she finds the divine within the material things and the terrain around her birthplace. Anderson addresses the text’s syncretism as Butts seeks to unify her recent commit-ment to Anglo-Catholicism with the paganism that had always enchanted her. In The Crystal Cabinet the author’s childhood relationships with things becomes a way of exploring challenging questions surrounding cre-ativity, the relationship between objects and cultural geography, divine life and the spiritual intensity of the object world.

Sheela Banerjee’s chapter discusses “Spectral Poetics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves”. Banerjee examines the radical formal innovation of Woolf’s most mystical novel, looking at her development of a remark-able ghostly aesthetic, bringing a new reading to the volume’s most widely recognized writer. Banerjee traces the largely unexplored aesthetic dialogue with Woolf’s contemporary T.S. Eliot, and shows how Woolf’s poetic prose combines the literary supernatural with an intuitive personal mysticism. Banerjee indicates that Woolf’s vision of the ghostly is perme-ated by mythic elements of epic texts such as The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy, and draws out telling parallels between the numinous strain of Woolf’s writing and concepts found in Indic philosophy. Banerjee looks


at how Woolf redefines the trope of the spectre, moving away from its tra-ditional associations with fear and death, and connects to an older, sacred meaning of the term, which embodies both the earthly and otherworldly facets of human existence. Banerjee’s shrewdly angled assessment of The Waves indicates how spiritual aesthetics and literary allusions are brought together in Woolf’s experimental prose.

In “The Queer Movements of Ecstasy and Asceticism in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul and Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists”, Ellen Ricketts considers the role of spirituality as a means of articulating same-sex desire in Hope Mirrlees’s first novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919) and Christopher St John’s Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul (1915). Ricketts shows that instances of religious ecstasy function within the texts as moments in which a queer transcendence of sexual norms takes place. Because of the spiritual dimension of the protagonists’ emotive gestures, the queer impulse in these narratives is an imagined projection into a future that expresses a utopian possibility. Ultimately, spiritual yearning comes to stand in for same-sex desire, the realization of which is portrayed as a cathartic or redemptive release.

In the final three chapters, our scholarly focus shifts to esoteric mysti-cism and the occult. Steven Quincey-Jones’s chapter “Dora Marsden and the ‘WORLD-INCLUSIVE I’: Egoism, Mysticism and Radical Feminism” examines the commingling of mysticism and radical feminism in Dora Marsden’s egoism as it appeared in the pages of The Egoist. Quincey-Jones argues that her disillusion with groups such as the Theosophical Society and Women’s Social and Political Union led Marsden to look for a philos-ophy that encouraged individual rights on the one hand and a universally attuned consciousness on the other. After a life-changing encounter with Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own in 1912, she set to work outlining an epistemology that would do just that. The result was the “World-Inclusive I”—a model for consciousness whose universalism superseded all civic and cultural boundaries, and had a measurable impact on the work of her lit-erary editors Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Thus Quincey-Jones concludes that feminist mysticism lies at the heart of the early modernist creative endeavours found in little magazines.

In “What Lies Below the Horizon of Life: The Occult Fiction of Dion Fortune”, Andrew Radford scrutinizes the fiction, essays and theoreti-cal manuals of Dion Fortune, who was, like Annie Besant, a formida-bly prolific advocate of occultism (see Wallraven 2015, 83). Described by Ronald Hutton as one of the most dynamic and resourceful figures


in early twentieth-century Western ceremonial magic, Fortune embodies a critically overlooked case study in how interwar women writers refined dissident models of consciousness from the overlapping fields of compara-tive religion, social psychology and aesthetics. Indeed, her unpublished notebooks and letters not only ponder the sacramental nature of social relations. These documents also reveal a remarkable grasp of the seminal studies of the provenance, forms and functions of religion: E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Like Mary Butts, Fortune has been described as a neo-romantic author whose imaginative excavations affirm the austere solitudes and mythol-ogized pasts of Cornwall, Dorset and the Wiltshire Downs; the south- western tip of Pembrokeshire; as well as other “Celtic” altars “in these islands” (Fortune 1931, 106).7 Yet whereas Butts’s writing stresses how “our real esoteric heritage” must remain among a few privileged adherents (Fortune 1931, 106), Fortune seeks to publicize recondite lore through eye-catching narrative conceits.

At issue in Fortune’s corpus is the nature and extent of women’s pro-motion of and contribution to myriad occult, theosophical and spiritu-alist cadres—particularly, how they savour vatic prestige and power in a culture which routinely devalues their civic capabilities. Radford indicates that Fortune’s popular occultism, far from offering a coherent or unam-biguously radical worldview, is distinguished by contradictory pressures. The egalitarian and progressive aspects of her cosmology—underlining shared spiritual exertions in official or informal networking clusters—chafe against literary tropes which are culturally elitist, exclusionary and puni-tive towards so-called class and ethnic trespassers (see Ferguson 2012). While Fortune’s fiction and mystical treatises display a wide knowledge of different numinous traditions, she is no zealous campaigner for the colonial syncretic. Unlike experimental interwar women writers such as H.D., whose mysticism is marked by a buoyant and heterodox hybridity, Fortune lauds occult cliques that are steeped in local pre-Christian tenets and systems of initiation.

In “What Words Conceal: H.D.’s Occult Word-Alchemy in the 1950s”, Matte Robinson contends that H.D.’s mature work of the 1950s repre-sents a distinct phase in her poetry, marked in part by the influence of her deep reading in the French occult tradition. Despite much recent scholarly


work on H.D.’s writing from her early Imagist poems through her mature epic poetry and her substantial prose oeuvre, her late poetry continues to be neglected. Here Robinson provides a trenchant analysis of the relation-ship between H.D.’s poetry of the 1940s and her later work in the 1950s, emphasizing the occult dimensions of her work. Robinson treats the way word-play, a notable technique in H.D.’s poetry, changes in character between Trilogy and later long poems Hermetic Definition and Vale Ave as the result of these readings. While language play is imagined as alchemy in the earlier text, in the later writing, it becomes instead associated with practical Kabbalah and its signature word-permutation techniques, which are meditative means of liberating the imagination from dualistic thinking. Robinson also demonstrates that alchemy is repurposed as an illustration of the Hermetic process by which an inner transformation is made, freeing up language as the primary medium for the Hermetic theurgical act—thus opening the possibility for a theurgical poetics.

Lara Vetter’s Afterword registers the extraordinary array of women modernists’ reactions to the myriad crises of the early twentieth century, focusing especially on engagements with orthodox and heterodox forms of religion and spirituality. Vetter traces a number of double-binds these women writers confronted, as they struggled with the ways in which claims to spiritual authority both empowered and disempowered them in the context of a world that was hostile to women, believers and avant- garde artists. Ultimately, the Afterword embraces a scholarly approach to women modernists that honours the paradoxes and contradictions inher-ent in their often fraught encounters with the otherworldly, arguing that we should resist totalizing narratives that threaten to elide the differences between them.

noteS

1. A number of scholarly works also scrutinize the topic of literary modernism and religion through a more circumscribed or single- author focus; see, for example, (Anderson 2013), (Robinson 2016), (Lazenby 2015), (Hobson 2011), (Sword 2002).

2. Teresa’s “mystical experience” in Hope Mirrlees’s 1924 novel The Counterplot is grounded in the pleasingly roughened surfaces of domestic décor: “the practical relation between her and the shabby familiar furniture suddenly snapped, and she looked at it with new eyes – the old basket chair, the horse-hair sofa […] they were now


merely arrangements of planes and lines, and, as such, startlingly significant. For the first time, she was looking at them aesthetically, and so novel was the sensation that it felt like a mystical experience” (Mirrlees 1924, 78).

3. Dorothy Scarborough’s 1917 text The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction addresses how innovations in “modern science, the new study of folklore, Psychical Research Societies, modern Spiritualism, the ‘wizardry of dreams studied scientifically’—all sug-gested new themes, novel complications” for ambitious authors (Scarborough 1917, 55).

4. Virginia Woolf, in her diary, notes that Mirrlees’s aesthetic practice is informed by a connoisseur’s “taste for the beautiful & elaborate in literature” (Woolf 1977, 257).

5. On Mirrlees as an exemplar of “magpie modernism, a sophisticated and scholarly complex of borrowings”, see (Connor 2014, 177–8).

6. Like Mary Butts, Mirrlees references the various monuments of the French culture capital to evoke a glamorous—and hazardous—psy-chic odyssey, from the relatively safe shores of waking consciousness, into an abstruse twilight terrain epitomized by the Parisian “Queer Street”. See (Clukey 2014; Radford 2011).

7. The British journalist Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980) is credited with being one of the first Anglophone public intellectuals to use the term “neo-romanticism” as a critical category in print. In his New Statesman and Nation article “Painting and Humanism” (March 28, 1942), Mortimer argues that neo-romantics are “more capricious and less concerned with rationalizing the world of phe-nomena than most artists in the past have been: they are in revolt against the European tradition of humanism. The appeal of their art, I fancy, is to mystics and particularly to pantheists who feel a frater-nity, or even a unity, with all living things, to those with the ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’” (Mortimer 1942, 208).


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