Love, Passion, Conversion: Constance Maynard and evangelical missionary writing

Abstract

This article explores how Constance Maynard understood her sexual emotions as part of her evangelical religion and how, in doing so, she was drawing on an evangelical tradition which placed strong emotion at the centre of religious experience. The article outlines how nineteenth-century women tract writers, missionaries and biographers wrote about female friendship and conversion using emotional rhetoric. The article analyses Maynard's diary entries to identify her use of missionary narrative tropes, arguing that, in the absence of psychoanalytic theories, Maynard turned to missionary narrative to make sense of her relationships with vulnerable women.