English
Bold Devotion: Female Religious Authority and Transatlantic 19th-Century Fiction
My project takes up an overlooked figure in the history of feminist literary studies and religious history: the female preacher and theologian. The nineteenth century is known for the flourishing of women writers across the Atlantic. Histories of the novel, however, tend to conceive of the British novel as a secular form, casting women’s struggles for freedom and authority in domestic and political terms. In the United States, women’s public speech has often been subsumed into discussions of either political suffrage and abolition or domestic sentimentality. Representations of the female preacher offer a unique piece of history because they were “too conservative to be remembered by the women’s rights activists, but too radical to be remembered by evangelicals,” as historian Catherine A. Brekus explains.1 Building on Brekus, I show that fiction was crucial ground for staging female preachers’ challenges to dominant cultural narratives.