CHRISTIAN AND LYRIC TRADITION IN VICTORIAN WOMEN S POETRY. Grey opens by acknowledging the unoriginal appearance of many of the

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1 1 F. ELIZABETH GREY CHRISTIAN AND LYRIC TRADITION IN VICTORIAN WOMEN S POETRY (Routledge, 2009) ix pp. Reviewed by Elizabeth Ludlow Grey opens by acknowledging the unoriginal appearance of many of the devotional lyrics composed by women during the Victorian era. As a characteristic example, she quotes from Elizabeth Ayton Godwin s Women (1 2), where Godwin voices the faithfulness of the timid form of woman who combines duty and love and anticipates a time when the entire community of Christian women will be permitted to stand/ A victor at [Christ s] own right hand. Typical of the voluminous body of Christian women s devotional poetry, Grey suggests, is Godwin s focus on Christ as the compassionate Guide who will At the last judgment day reward the many women whose earthly lives are lived out in obscurity. In suggesting that through such poems women implicitly call for recognition from both God and man, she sets out to redefine devotional poetry within a gendered context and to illuminate the entwined spiritual and literary aspirations of women in this unique historical period (137). Grey contends that the body of religious poetry exemplified by Godwin s Women has been unjustly neglected. But in choosing, without comment, to introduce the poet as Mrs, she misses an opportunity to weigh the significance of

2 2 this title and the overt link it forges between the author and the speaker of the poem, whose name remains unknown Save in the household circle small. Gray might also have noted that by choosing to put her marital status to creative use, Godwin implicitly associates herself with authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Ward, who recognised that marketing themselves as Mrs gave them the authority of a matron. As this point suggests, Grey could have grounded her project more fully in the larger context of Victorian studies by examining the vast body of Christian women s poetry alongside both the composition and reception of the work of writers such as Gaskell. Nevertheless, Grey justifies keeping her focus firmly on Christian women s poetry by arguing that it has received less than its due. While the theme of religion in women s novels has already been discussed extensively by critics such as Christine Kruger (The Reader s Repentance, 1992) and Ruth Jenkins (Reclaiming Myths of Power [1995] qtd, p. 86), she notes that, religious poetry has been consistently under read and under theorised (18 19). Grey reminds us that it was once widely read. Although largely invisible to the typical undergraduate whose questioning she responds to in her introduction, volumes such as Godwin s Songs for the Weary: The School of Sorrow and Other Poems (1878) were Grey says a hot commodity for Victorian readers (193). Attributing the current invisibility of devotional poetry to the negative critical preconceptions of scholars more concerned with the poetry of spiritual crisis, Grey

3 3 contends that devotional poetry actively transformed the Victorian spiritual climate (225). She treats this diverse body of poetry as a whole. Rather than presenting each of the poems as the product or fruit of a particular religious, cultural, or geographical background, she claims that they can all be meaningfully and productively discussed as a distinct, discrete body of work (5). While this inclusivity has its drawbacks, it helps to show how the poetry influenced the devotional practices of the church and subsequently altered the fabric of society. Recognizing the operation of a bewildering array of beliefs (5), Grey acknowledges the significance of recent scholarship that has sought to uncover certain particularities of Victorian Christianity. To this end, she highlights the timeliness of her project in furthering the work of scholars such as John Shelton Reed (on Anglo Catholics) and Elizabeth Jay (on Evangelicals), who have studied the relation between literature and the practice of faith. Pre empting the criticism of sceptical readers, Grey argues that an analysis of a diverse selection of lyrics from women across the spectrum of Christian denominations need not be superficial. Recognizing that her initial aspirations for the project were ridiculously huge (4), she explains why she chose to concentrate primarily on lyric poetry that expresses a direct relationship to God. Though we might have welcomed more on the denominational nuances of the hermeneutical methodology employed in the poetry, we should not overlook the benefits of Grey s approach, along with her tactful acknowledgment of denominational expression. In choosing not to highlight each poet s affiliation, she gains the freedom to consider

4 4 poets who attached themselves to newly developed denominations such as the Salvation Army. Her methodology also enables her to consider the various influences operating in the work of poets such as Mary Howitt, who, raised a Quaker, experimented with Unitarianism and spiritualism before converting to Roman Catholicism (58). More significantly, Grey demonstrates how the synoptic analysis of the Roman Catholic and High Anglican with the Presbyterian and Unitarian brings the work of poets from diverse denominational backgrounds into a fruitful dialogic exchange with one another as well as with their male counterparts. One of the most significant productions of the now neglected genre of women s religious verse, she argues, was a community, and a particular sense of spiritual community. The vigorous body of their verse, she adds, brought a more inclusive language to the traditional church structures: a language with which believers could speak of God, speak to God, and construct their own personal relationship with God (9). Since Grey incorporates poets from Unitarian and Quaker backgrounds into her study, she might have argued that Christian women poets not only adapt the poetics of traditional church discourses to suit their own endeavours, but also envisage new ones. She could have made this point regarding Howitt s creative response to the generic conventions governing traditional scriptural interpretation. In her ballad Dives and Lazarus, Howitt retells the story of the rich man and the beggar as a folktale meant to stir the feelings of Victorian readers by its various references to consumer wealth. As Grey also notes, the beggar outside the rich man s house is introduced like a folktale character: Twas in the dreary winter, and

5 5 on a stone he sat. Thus, Grey notes, Howitt s narrative yokes the parable text with ghosts of other fantastic texts. By combining traditional hermeneutical practices with the language of folktale, the poet creates something new, establishing her authority to interpret the Bible, entertain readers, and teach (58 61). Rather than consider Howitt as idiosyncratic in her poetic endeavours, Grey contends that the Christian community of Victorian women poets worked together to produce transfigurations of the Bible, the Prayer Book, and of the sermons they heard. Transfigure, Grey notes, means to change the outer appearance as well as to elevate, glorify, idealise, or spiritualise. So they were not just passive consumers but active and attentive readers (31). By re writing scripture into poetry, Grey argues, the female writer could participate in the sacred and sacralising work of producing inspired and authorized texts and, in turn, extend this invitation to her readers (58). The notion of participation is the key to understanding the combination of devotional sentiment and lyric verse structure in the poetry Grey treats. Although she just briefly interrogates the implications of the subtitle for chapter 1, Heirs of more than royal race (taken from John Keble s Palm Sunday and again repeated in Emily S.G. Saunders poem, Evening Hymn ), Grey astutely considers the complex negotiations that female poets conducted as both authors and participants in worship. As heirs of a heavenly father and members of a spiritual community, they sought to authorize their readers as legitimate interpreters of the scriptures.

6 6 Establishing the theoretical parameters of her argument, Grey invokes the feminist theology of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who writes that using the Bible as a resource for creativity allows women to enter the biblical story with the help of historical imagination [and] artistic recreation ( Bread not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation [1985] 20). Citing this comment and engaging with the hermeneutics of actualization, Grey explains that by creating their own spiritual echo chamber[s], the poets modestly yet actively enter and insert themselves in the biblical narrative. Moreover, she shows how a democratic polysemy informs their lyrical articulations of spiritual identity and draws attention to their consistently voiced concern with issues of marginality and indeterminacy (22). As she investigates these issues further, Grey acknowledges her debts to the valuable work of Cynthia Scheinberg on Victorian women s use of Old Testament singers (10) and to Fiorenza s kyriarchal model of investigating and understanding power relations (23). But Grey sometimes critiques her precursors. Significantly, she challenges the lack of power that Scheinberg ascribes to the Virgin Mary (in Women s Poetry and Religion [2002] 79). Rather than conceiving of Elizabeth Barrett Browning s depiction of the Virgin as a leader and a spiritual prophet as an exception to the general rule, Grey argues that this instance is actually one among many (96 97). Given the many, albeit less well known, depictions of the Virgin Mary as a powerful role model, Grey is not convinced by Scheinberg s suggestion that Christian women found it somehow easier to construct an

7 7 authoritative female poetic identity out of the Old (potentially Jewish) rather than New (clearly Christian) Testament ( WPR 69, qtd. 89). Grey shows how Victorian women poets discovered their authoritative spiritual identity by negotiating simultaneously with the narratives of the Old and the New Testament. In addition, she grapples with the problem of assessing poetry that is almost entirely made up of biblical phrases. Taking her cue from Alicia Ostriker s Feminist Revision and the Bible (1993), she emphasizes the importance of viewing male and female engagement with the Bible on equal terms. If it may be said that the language of the Bible takes over [Christina] Rossetti s language, Grey asks us to consider the extent to which Rossetti s poetic language can be seen to take over the Bible itself (39). In light of this appropriation, Grey observes that many poems by lesser known writers challenge our aesthetic expectations by repeatedly citing Scripture. In Eva Travers Evered Poole s Giving and Taking, for instance, every single line of the seven quatrains is extensively footnoted (47). Poems such as this, which include scriptural phrases alongside footnotes and which direct the reader to particular passages, require a reading process that travels out of the poem, returns, leaves the poems, and returns. For this reason, Grey associates such poems with popular, male authored, Bible commentaries and numerous Bibles that incorporate complex referencing systems (49). This association, she argues, empowers the female reader to become an active participant in the exegetical process.

8 8 Pursuing this line of enquiry, Grey shows how several female poets put a female self back into the biblical narrative by means of what she calls a subjective swerve (75). Ann Butler s Difficulties Removed, for instance, begins with a traditional Biblical story the visit of the two Mary s to the grave of Jesus and then turns the gravestone into a literary trope, so that the speaker can respond personally to the story and turn her own spiritual journey into a work of art (76 7). Besides tracing other examples of this subjective swerve, Grey could have done more with Fiorenza s theoretical models of imaginative identification. She could also have built a stronger theoretical framework for her project by considering how Fiorenza s models correspond to the poetic theories formulated by Isobel Armstrong, whose work on Tractarian poetics Grey extends (20). A consideration of Armstrong s seminal work on poetics and materiality would have also worked well in Grey s final chapter on poetic style. Throughout this chapter, Grey tries to map the material particularities of the poet s cultural and spiritual environs. Revisiting Jerome McGann s suggestion that poets are torn between separate poles of virtue and virtuosity ( Poetics of Sensibility [1996] 52), she contends that Victorian women poets sought to establish their claim to the former by demonstrating their poetic facility with the latter (185). To advance our current rethinking of sentimentality in Victorian literature, she suggests, we must reappraise what looks to us like emotional excess or even fakery. While conducting this reappraisal, Grey shows how Victorian devotional poetry communicates with other art forms including music, spinning, and carving. Adelaide Proctor s One by One, for instance, presents the process of creating a

9 9 crown or chaplet as a metaphor for composing poetry. Behind the almost overdetermined formalism of the poem, which suggests fakery, Grey traces elements of provocative questioning, and she contends that the formal elements of the verse complicate the surface message. By progressively describing in neat stanzas the process of setting a crown with gems, Grey argues, Proctor undermines the theme of vanitas mundi. The poem, she writes, both posits that intangible heavenly reward in the world to come and presents in itself an achieved treasure (198 9). Rather than dismissing poems like One by One as formulaic, then, Grey urges us to view them through the lens of deliberateness (199). We can thus discover the creativity with which they often deploy the repetition to be found in the liturgy or the counting of the rosary, and we can learn to read their poetic ornamentalism as in itself a form of assertion. Grey also explains how the repetition used in these poems can serve exegetical ends. Having earlier shown how Frances Ridley Havergal makes Biblical parallelism and linguistic antithesis inform her verse (146), Grey finds that in Just as Thou wilt, Emma Muir uses metrical inexorability and consistent repetition to accentuate the belief that God s direction is unwavering (202). Bringing fresh insights to the deployment of repetition, ornamentalism, and archaisms, Grey s monograph provides an important contribution to the developing task of reassessing women s poetry and Christian tradition. Recognizing that much more could have been said, Grey concludes by describing her book as a brief introduction to the creativity and complexity of Victorian women poets

10 10 transfigurations of their lyric and Christian inheritances (229). Since this introduction points the way to various widening fields of scholarship, it will undoubtedly help us re evaluate the Victorian female self as an interpreter of and participant in the biblical narrative. Elizabeth Ludlow is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.