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 Modernist
Women Writers
and Spirituality
A Piercing Darkness

Edited by
el iz abe t h an derson ,
an dr e w radf or d, and
h eat h er walt on
Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality
Andrew Radford • Heather Walton • Elizabeth Anderson
Editors

Modernist Women
Writers and
Spirituality
A Piercing Darkness
Editors
Andrew Radford Heather Walton
University of Glasgow University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK Glasgow, UK

Elizabeth Anderson
University of Stirling
Stirling, UK

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

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956652

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The 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.

Cover illustration: © A. T. Willett / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 Acknowledgements

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.

v
 Contents

Introduction: The Intricate Persistence of Strange Gods1

Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Walton

Radical Unorthodoxy: Religious and Literary Modernisms

in H.D. and Mary Butts21
Suzanne Hobson

Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn Underhill, the

Subliminal Consciousness and Spiritual Direction39
Jamie Callison

Stevie Smith’s Serious Play: A Modernist Reframing of

Christian Orthodoxy55
Gillian Boughton

Faith in Ruins: Fragments and Pattern in the Late Works of

Rose Macaulay69
Heather Walton

Jane Harrison’s Ritual Scholarship95

Mimi Winick

vii
viii CONTENTS

Antiquarian Magic: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Theory

and Hope Mirrlees’s Antiquarianism in Paris 115
Nina Enemark

Childish Things: Spirituality, Materiality and Creativity in

Mary Butts’s The Crystal Cabinet 135
Elizabeth Anderson

Spectral Poetics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves153

Sheela Banerjee

The Queer Movements of Ecstasy and Asceticism in

Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul and Madeleine: One
of Love’s Jansenists169
Ellen Ricketts

Dora Marsden and the “WORLD-INCLUSIVE I”: Egoism,

Mysticism and Radical Feminism185
Steven Quincey-Jones

What Lies Below the Horizon of Life: The Occult Fiction

of Dion Fortune201
Andrew Radford

What Words Conceal: H.D.’s Occult Word-Alchemy in

the 1950s219
Matte Robinson

Afterword: Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality237

Lara Vetter

Bibliography247

Index273
 Notes on Contributors

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

ix
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.
 Introduction: The Intricate Persistence
of Strange Gods

Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford,

and Heather Walton

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

E. Anderson (*)
University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
A. Radford • H. Walton
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

© The Author(s) 2016 1

E. Anderson et al. (eds.), Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_1
2 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 3

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
4 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 5

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
6 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

“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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 7

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 Brâncuşi—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
8 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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-
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 9

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
10 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 11

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
12 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 13

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
14 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 15

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
16 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 17

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
18 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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
 INTRODUCTION: THE INTRICATE PERSISTENCE OF STRANGE GODS 19

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
20 E. ANDERSON ET AL.

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).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
E si na festividade
D’aquelle martyr frechado
Se dá á todo o culpado
Remissão e liberdade,
De Deus na Natividade,
Á que já de agora assisto,
Muito mais logar tem isto,
E com tanta mais razão
Quanto vai por medição
De São Sebastião á Christo.

Nós os abaixo assignados

Pedimos com humildade,
Ou fundados na piedade,
Ou na amizade fiados,
Que d’esses grilhões malvados
Por seu duro e infame tracto,
Solteis o prêzo malato,
Porque tem bons fiadores
Nestes vossos servidores,
De que ha de ser bom mulato.
 Á ANTONIA
MOÇA PARDA DE PERNAMIRIM CHAMADA VULGARMENTE
CATONA

Que pouco sabe de amor

Quem viu, formosa Catona,
Que ha nessa celeste zona
Astro ou luminar maior.
Tambem a violeta é flor,
E mais é negra a violeta,
E si bem póde um poeta
Uma flor negra estimar,
Tambem eu posso adorar
Nos céus um pardo planeta.

Catona é moça luzida,

Que á pouco custo se asseia,
Entende-se como feia,
Mas é formosa entendida:
Escuza-se commedida,
E ajusta-se envergonhada,
Não é tão desapegada
Que negue á uma alma esperança,
Porque emquanto a não alcança,
Não morra desesperada.
Piza airoso e compassado,
Sabe-se airosa mover,
Calça que é folgar de ver,
E mais anda a pé folgado:
Conversa bem sem cuidado,
Ri sizuda na occasião,
Escuta com attenção,
Responde com seu desdem,
E inda assim responde bem,
E bemquista a sem razão.

É parda de tal talento,

Que a mais branca e a mais bella,
Podéra trocar com ella
A côr pelo entendimento
A um prodigio, um portento;
E si vos espanta ver,
Que adrêde me ando a perder;
Dá-me por desculpa amor,
Que é femea trajada em flor,
E sol mentido em mulher.
 Á MESMA CATONA
DESPEDINDO-SE O AUCTOR DE PERNAMIRIM PARA A VILLA
DE S. FRANCISCO

Não vos pude merecer,

Pois vos não pude agradar,
Mas eu hei de me vingar,
Catona, em mais vos querer;
Vós sempre á me aborrecer
Com odio mortal e atroz,
E eu a seguir-vos veloz,
Si sois veremos emfim
Mais firme em fugir-me a mim,
Que eu em seguir-vos á vós.

Quizera vos persuadir,

Porque vos saibaes haver,
Que sou mais firme em querer,
Que vós ligeira em fugir:
Eu não hei de desistir
D’esta minha pretenção,
Quer vós o approveis, quer não,
Porque vêr me importaria
Si talvez faz a porfia
O que não fez a razão.
Mil vezes o tempo faz
O que á razão não conveio,
Metterei pois tempo em meio,
Porque elle nos metta em paz:
Vós estaes muito tenaz
Em dar-me um e outro não,
E eu, levado da affeição,
Espero tempo melhor,
Onde o que não obra amor
Vença o tempo, obre a razão.

Catona, a minha esperança

Me dá por conselho são,
Que espere, porque o rifão
Diz que quem espera alcança:
Tudo tem certa mudança,
O bem males ameaça,
O mal para bem se passa,
Que como a fortuna joga,
O braço que hoje me affoga,
Talvez amanhã me abraça.
 Á ANNICA
UMA MULATA DA CAJAHYBA

Annica, o que me quereis,

Que tanto me enfeitiçaes,
Uma vez quando cantaes,
E outra quando appareceis?
Si por matar-me o fazeis,
Fazei esse crime atroz
De matar-me sós por sós,
Para que eu tenha o soccorro,
Que vendo que por vós morro,
Viva de morrer por vós.

Matar-me eu o soffrerei,
Mas soffrei tambem chegar-me,
Que ter asco de matar-me
Jámais o consentirei:
Fugir e matar não sei,
Anna, como o conseguis?
Mas si a minha sorte o quiz
E vós, Anna, o intentaes,
Não podeis matar-me mais
Do que quando me fugis.
Chegae e matar-me já:
Não chegando estou já morto;
Coisa que se me tem absorto,
Matar-me quem não me dá:
Chegae, Anna, para cá,
Para dar-me essa ferida,
Porque fugir de corrida
E matar-me d’essa sorte,
Si o vejo na minha morte,
O não vi na minha vida.

Não sei que pós foram estes

Que na alma me derramastes?
Não sei com que me matastes?
Não sei o que me fizestes?
Sei que aqui me apparecestes,
E vendo-vos com antolhos,
Topei com tantos abrolhos
Na vossa dura conquista,
Que me tirastes a vista
E me quebrastes os olhos.
 Á UMA MULATA
DE PERNAMIRIM CHAMADA LUZIA

Parti o bolo, Luzia,

Que a mim mesmo me acommoda:
Não deis a fatia toda,
Dae-me parte da fatia:
Quem pede como eu pedia,
Pede tudo o que lhe importa
E acceita o que se lhe corta,
E quem dá com manha e arte
Seus dados sempre reparte,
Si tem mais pobres á porta.

Não é bem que tudo eu cobre,

E é bem que um pouco me deis;
Dae-me um pouco e alegrar-me-heis:
Com pouco se alegra o pobre;
Não deis coisa que me sóbre,
Dai-me siquer um bocado;
Mas o que vos persuado
Que deis com manha e com arte,
Dando vós e de tal parte,
Sempre será grande o dado.
Si á todos cinco sentidos
Não tendes coisa que dar,
Dae ao de vêr e apalpar,
Os dois sejam preferidos:
Não deis que ouvir aos ouvidos,
Mas dae aos olhos que vêr
E ao tacto em que se entreter;
Deitemos á bom partir
Os dois sentidos a rir
E os demais a padecer

As mãos folgam de apalpar,

Os olhos folgam de vêr,
Os dois logrem seu prazer,
Os tres sintam seu pezar:
Que depois que isto lograr,
Virá o mais por seu pé,
Que inda que ninguem me dê,
Nem eu o tome á ninguem,
Morrerá vosso desdem
Ás forças de minha fé.
 A ANTONIA
MOÇA PARDA, CHAMADA A MARIMBONDA, QUE MORAVA NA
RUA DA POEIRA, E A VIU O P. NO CAMPO DA PALMA DEBAIXO
DE UMA URUPEMBA EM CASA DE UMA AMIGA. ALLUDE AO
REMEDIO SYMPATHICO DE SE QUEIMAR A CASA DOS
MARIMBONDOS, PARA SE EXTINGUIR LOGO A DÓR DAS
SUAS PICADAS

Fui hoje ao Campo da Palma,

Onde com subito estrondo
Me investiu um marimbondo,
Que me picou dentro da alma:
Era já passada a calma,
E eu me sentia encalmado,
Corrido e injuriado,
Porque sendo obrigação
Metter-lhe eu o meu ferrão,
Eu fui o que vim picado.

Fiz por fecha-lo na mão,

Mas o marimbondo azedo
Me picava em qualquer dedo
E escapava por então:
Desesperada funcção
Foi esta, pois me fui pondo
Tão abolhado em redondo
Por cara, peito e vasios,
Que estou com febres e frios
Morrendo do marimbondo.
Dizem que a vingança está
Em lhe saber eu da casa,
Porque deixando-lh’a em braza,
Um fogo outro abrandará:
Mas temo não arderá,
Por mais que toda uma matta
Lhe applique com mão ingrata,
Porque o que eu lhe hei de pôr
Ha de ser fogo de amor,
Que inda que abraza, não mata.

Nesta afflicção tão penosa

D’onde me virá o soccorro?
Morrerei, pois por quem morro,
Morro uma morte formosa:
Esta dôr tão tormentosa
Me levará de maneira,
Que, ou ella queira ou não queira,
Em chegando á sua rua,
Si acaso se mostrar crua,
Tudo irá numa poeira.
 SAUDOSO
DE PERNAMIRIM, E POR OCCASIÃO DE HAVER VISTO NA
VILLA DE S. FRANCISCO, ONDE ESTAVA, UM MOLEQUE
CHAMADO MOÇORONGO, ESCREVE A UM AMIGO D’AQUELLE
SITIO

ROMANCE

Veiu aqui o Moçorongo

Tão occulto e escondido,
Que não sei si o tenha a elle,
Si a vós por meu inimigo.

Chegou terça feira á tarde,

Metteu-se em casa de Chico,
Passou a tarde e a noite,
E o peior é que dormindo.

Porque havia de dormir

O Moçorongo maldicto,
Sabendo que estava eu
Desvelado e affligido?

Amanheceu quarta feira,

Chegou o nosso Arcebispo,
Gastou-se toda a manhã
Com visitas e visitos.

Deu meio dia, e fui eu

Para casa dos amigos
Esfaimado como um cão,
E como um lobo faminto.
Quando o cão do Moçorongo
Sahiu do seu escondrijo,
E sem lhe occorrer o encontro
Deu de focinhos commigo.

Alegrei-me, e enfadei-me,
Que ha casos em que é preciso
Que se mostre ao mesmo tempo
Alegre um peito e mofino.

Amofinou-me a traição
Com que elle esteve escondido,
E alegrei-me de encontrar
Com gente d’esse districto.

Perguntei logo por vós,

Por Ignacio e Antonico,
Por Luzia e por Catona,
E mais gente d’esse sitio.

Todos estão com saude,

Me disse o crioulo esquivo,
Um tanto triste da cara,
Pouco alegre do focinho.

Mas eu fiz-lhe muita festa,

Assim por ser seu amigo,
Como por ser cousa vossa,
E neste pasto nascido.

Perguntei si me escreveras,
Zombou d’isso, e deu-me um trinco
Zombou com cara risonha,
Trincou com dedo tangido.
D’isto formo a minha queixa,
D’isto fico mui sentido,
Pois sei que tendes papel,
Tinteiro, penna e juizo.

Mais andar lá nos veremos,

E vereis que de sentido
Vos hei de estrugir a vozes,
E me hei de espojar a gritos.

Meus recados a Luzia,

E que estou já de caminho,
Porque só ella me farta,
E á fome aqui me entizico.
 ESCREVE
TAMBEM QUEIXOSO A SEU AMIGO IGNACIO, MORADOR EM
PERNAMIRIM, EM QUEM FALLA NO ROMANCE ANTECEDENTE.

ROMANCE

Senhor Ignacio, é possivel

Que quizestes desdizer
D’aquella boa opinião
Que eu tinha na vossa fé?

É possivel que um amigo,

De que tanto confiei,
Nem por escripto me falla,
Nem em pessoa me vê?

É possivel que uma ausencia

Tanta potestade tem,
Que ao vivo morto reputa
No que toca ao bem querer?

Si isto em vós a ausencia faz,

Como em meu peito o não fez?
Não sois vós o meu ausente,
Que em meu peito viveis?

O certo é, meu amigo,

Disse amigo, mas errei,
Que não sois amigo já,
Sois o meu socio talvez.
Fostes socio nos caminhos
D’aquella terra infiel,
Onde Luzia traidora,
E Catona descortez,

Me privaram dos sentidos,

E me deixaram crueis
O corpo uma chaga viva
A golpes de seus desdens.

Mas eu me não queixo d’ellas,

Que de nenhuma mulher,
Má ou boa, ha de queixar-se
Homem que juizo tem.

Queixo-mo de vosso tio,

Que se foi por me empecer
Esta terceira jornada
Para acabar o entremez.

Praza a Deus que ache Simoa,

A quem amante foi ver,
Como ha de achar Antonica
Farta de xesmininez.

D’aquella Antonica fallo,

Que pôz no negro poder
Das Quitas, para que a guardem,
E a guardarem ao revez.

Que a Silvestre a entregaram,

O qual, como vós sabeis,
Apezar dos dias sanctos
Lhe deu tanto que fazer.
Mas pois em Pernamirim,
E em suas cousas toquei,
Neste mesmo assumpto quero
Me façais uma mercê.

Dizei-me si está o Antonio

Recolhido a seu vergel,
Onde era geral Adão
Das Evas que Deus lhe deu.

E si acaso tiver vindo,

Vos peço que lhe mandeis
Este romance fechado
Em um molhado papel.

Porque no molhado veja

O chôro com que lancei
Estes versinhos tão tristes
Por amar e querer bem,

A elle, que me fugiu

D’esta casa, ha mais de um mez,
E á Catona que o imita
No esquivo e no infiel.

E com isto, e outro tanto

Que me fica por dizer,
Adeus, até que tenhais
Quem vos traga a meu vergel.
 Á ANTONIO DE ANDRADE
SENDO DESPENSEIRO DA MISERICORDIA

Senhor Antonio de Andrade,

Não sei si vos gabe mais
As franquezas naturaes,
Ou si a christã charidade:
Toda esta nossa Irmandade,
Que á pasmos emmudeceis,
Vendo as obras que fazeis,
Não sabe decidir não
Si egualaes o amor de irmão,
Ou si de pae o excedeis.

Ou, senhor, vós sois parente

De toda esta enfermaria,
Ou vos vem por recta via
Ser pae de todo o doente:
Quem vos vê tão diligente,
Tão caritativo e tão
Inclinado á compaixão,
Dirá de absorto e pasmado,
Que entretanto mal curado,
Só vós fostes homem são.
Aquella mesma piedade,
A que vos move um doente,
Vos mostra evidentemente
Homem são na qualidade:
De qualquer enfermidade
São aphorismos não vãos,
Que enfermarão mil irmãos:
Mas si o contrario se alude
Somente a vossa saude
Foi contagio de mil sãos.

Quem não sarou d’esta vez

Fica muito temeroso,
Que lhe ha de ser mui penoso
Acabar-se-vos o mez:
Ninguem jámais isto fez,
Nem é coisa contingente
O ficar toda esta gente
Com perigo tão atroz,
Que se acabe o mez á vós
Para mal de outro doente.
 AO CAPITÃO
JOÃO RODRIGUES DOS REIS, HOMEM GENEROSO E
ALENTADO, GRANDE AMIGO DO P.

Meu capitão dos Infantes,

Que por vossas boas artes,
Sois homem de muitas partes,
Nascendo só em Abrantes:
Por vossos ditos galantes,
Discretos e cortezãos,
E por largueza de mãos
Á todos nos pareceis
Não sómente João dos Reis,
Si não o rei dos Joãos.

O principe, que de juro

Senhorêa os corações,
Como lá disse Camões,
Que sois vós o conjecturo:
Tanto nisto me asseguro,
Que em ver como procedeis,
Presumo que descendeis
De algum principe de França,
D’onde tendes por herança
Esse appellido dos Reis.