ATHEIST PROPHECY: MATHILDE BLIND, CONSTANCE NADEN, AND THE VICTORIAN POETESS

Abstract

Scholars of nineteenth-century women's poetry often recount that the sentimental piety – indeed, the quasi-religiosity – of the Victorian “poetess” disappears from women's poetry in the mordant irony of thefin de siècle.Virginia Blain, for instance, has recently identified Mathilde Blind and Constance Naden as representatives of “the new breed of post-Darwinian atheists” that comes to replace an earlier, implicitly Christian feminine tradition associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Blain 332). On a related note, I have recently proposed that George Eliot'sLegend of Jubalcollections (1874, 1878) present a rather late instance of this poetess tradition (LaPorte 159–61). In what follows, I would like to argue thatfin-de-siècleiconoclasts such as Blind and Naden actually work hard to reclaim and redeem some of the prominent religious elements of the mid-century poetess tradition, and that Eliot's unusual combination of sentimental piety and religious skepticism gives them a particularly useful model for doing so.