Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature

Rebecca Styler is Associate Professor in English at the University of Lincoln, UK. Having received her PhD from the University of Leicester, she has published in nineteenth-century literature, religion and gender, including a monograph Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (2010) and numerous articles and book chapters on writers including Anna Jameson, Anne Brontë, Josephine Butler and Elizabeth Gaskell, as well as on feminist utopias and religious life writing.

• 1 The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Culture: Sympathy, Prophecy, Nature2 Faces of the Madonna in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction: Feminist Justice and the Matriarchal Divine3 George Macdonald’s Fairy God Mothers: Romantic Religion, Female Vocation and Maternalist Communities4 Josephine Butler, Esoteric Christianity and the Biblical Motherhood of God5 ‘The Big Good Thing’: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s gospel of maternal optimism and Demetrian Utopia6 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘Maternal Pantheism’: Religion in Utopian Motherlands 1889-1915

"This excellent new book by Rebecca Styler shows us what is at stake when we look to gendered language to think about God. Exploring work by a series of authors who connected the idea of God with motherhood, Styler reveals the capacity of literature to do theology and change the way we think about the world. The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature makes a compelling intervention in our understanding of religion and literature."-- Mark Knight, Professor in Literature, Religion, and Victorian Studies, Lancaster University