<em>Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall</em>, by Joanna Dean

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall LeeAnne M. Richardson (bio) Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall, by Joanna Dean; pp. x + 322. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007, $19.95, £14.99. This biography of Lily Dougall narrates the life of a novelist, theologian, and lesbian, and occupies—or, perhaps, destabilizes—multiple disciplinary categories. Dougall was neither British nor American, but resided in both countries for extended periods of her life. She was born in Montreal, moved to New York as a teenager, and spent much of her adulthood in Cumnor, a small town near Oxford, England. She did not, it seems, think of herself as a lesbian, yet she lived nearly her entire adult life in an intimate relationship with another woman, Sophie Earp. Her life was defined by various types of writing: she edited religious newspapers; she wrote and published ten New Woman novels and [End Page 729] numerous short stories; and she penned theological articles and books, some of which were published anonymously, some under her name, and some collaboratively. Historian Joanna Dean makes a persuasive case for the importance of Dougall to understanding the development of Anglican modernism (as well as Broad Church liberalism more generally) at the turn of the last century. Dean also compellingly demonstrates how closely political and religious history are entwined when she describes the cultural shift accompanying the onset of World War I: the turmoil and wide-scale destruction rendered the modernist "optimistic immanent theology" inadequate to account for the disorder of the world at war, and as a result "the neo-orthodox idea of a sinful humanity presided over by an inscrutable, transcendent God" regained its hold on England's religious imagination (183). In large part because of this shift, Dougall's name and her contributions to liberal theology were largely forgotten for the rest of the twentieth century. Dean uses Dougall's unpublished first novel, "Lovereen, A Canadian Novel," to fill in the documentary gaps in Dougall's young womanhood and to explore the attitudes, beliefs, and emotions surrounding her increasing sense of separation from her parents' religion. Born into an evangelical Presbyterian newspaper family, Dougall's later liberal religious views often conflicted with the strict Biblical interpretations of her upbringing; yet Dean shows the correspondences between Dougall's early and late thought and provides a template for understanding the course of Dougall's intellectual development and religious dissidence, which began when she was still in her teens. Dean astutely draws on "Lovereen," never reductively attributing a character's sentiments to Dougall herself, but rather using the novel as an interpretative supplement and a gauge to measure Dougall's attitudes. The bulk of the biography is an intellectual/theological history of Dougall's participation in and contributions to Anglican reformist movements. Noting that "intellectual freedom and religious faith are usually understood as mutually incompatible" (3), Dean describes Dougall's thought as dialectical: her faith fueled her thought, and her tendency toward free thought fueled her reevaluations of theology and belief. Gender complicates this dialectic and informs Dean's analysis of Dougall's experiential religion. Dougall's experiences as a woman empowered her to speak of her genuine religious emotion (because women's piety was culturally approved) but also adversely affected her ability to trust her own voice (because theology was largely the domain of masculine authority). Thus, even in her theological works, Dougall "expressed her ideas through metaphor and plot, through humor and dialogue" (11). For a literary critic, the most appealing section of the biography is chapter 5, "'She Was Always a Queer Child.'" This chapter describes Dougall's relationship with Earp, and it provides an excellent historicized overview of female-female relationships in addition to its discussions of Dougall's novels. Dean could have strengthened her claims to Dougall's significance with an analysis of how the themes and aims of these novels—which feature strong-minded women who struggle with faith, family, and society—relate to the secular New Woman novel. Because they seem quite congruent (with daughters who must sacrifice their independence for family concerns and women uninterested in marrying and having...