Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture

FREDERICK S. RODEN is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA. He has published articles on Victorian literature and culture, religion and homosexuality, gender theory, and medievalism.

• Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: COMMUNITY Queer Virginity and the Oxford Movement: Newman and Dalgairns Christina Rossetti: The Female Queer Virgin PART II: CONSCIOUSNESS Female Religious Homoeroticism: The Sisters Rossetti and Keary Eremitic Homoerotics: The Religious Culture of Gerard Manley Hopkins PART III: COMSUMMATION Oscar Wilde as Queer Theologian Queer Hagiography: John Gray and André Raffalovich Lesbian Trinitarianism, Canine Catholicism: Michael Field Catholic Homosexuality at the Fin-de Siècle Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

'Roden's rich book shows how Victorian Catholicisms could provide both faces and disguises for same-sex love. From Newman to Wilde and Christina Rossetti to Michael Field, he recovers the power of religion to sustain homoerotic lives for women and men who were and were not homosexual. Consider it an Introduction to the Devout Queer Life by a deft reader and astute believer.' - Mark Jordan, Emory University 'In charting this fascinating, difficulty territory of cultural history, Roden deploys an impressive and formidable scholarship. He draws on stimulating recent critical perspectives on Victorian religious culture to draw together a disparate group of women and men writing towards what he terms 'the creation of a homosexual Catholicism for modernity.' - The Oscholars 'Roden's rich book shows how Victorian catholicisms could provide both faces and disguises for same-sex love. From Newman to Wilde and Christina Rossetti to Michael Field, he recovers the power of religion to sustain homoerotic lives for women and men who were and were not homosexual. Consider it an Introduction to the Devout Queer Life by a deft reader and astute believer.' - Mark Jordan, Department of Religion, Emory University 'His book represents a valuable synthesis of contemporary queer scholarship...profoundly worthwhile for the original reseach...' - Eibhear Walshe, The Oscholars 'Highly informative and insightful study proves essential for an understanding of lesbian writing in the first half of the twentieth-century, even as it illuminates the second half of the nineteenth...Roden does a masterful job of rescuing these 'queer' facts from the realm of the potentially ridiculous and returning them to the serious...I only wish that I had had access sooner to Roden's chapter, to lift the cloud of my undergraduate students' confusion.' - Margaret D. Stetz, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature