Women’s Writing and Mission in the Nineteenth Century

<p>Until now the missionary plot in Charlotte Brontë’s <em>Jane Eyre</em> has been seen as marginal and anomalous. Despite women missionaries being ubiquitous in the nineteenth century they appeared to be absent from nineteenth-century literature. As this book demonstrates though the female missionary character and narrative was in fact present in a range of writings from missionary newsletters and life writing to canonical Victorian literature New Woman fiction and women’s college writing. Nineteenth-century women writers wove the tropes of the female missionary figure and plot into their domestic fiction and the female missionary themes of religious self-sacrifice and heroism formed the subjectivity of these writers and their characters. Offering an alternative narrative for the development of women writers and early feminism as well as a new reading of <em>Jane Eyre</em> this book adds to the debate about whether religious women in the nineteenth century could actually be radical and feminist.</p>