Revelations of Romantic Childhood: Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, and Victorian Women's Spiritual Autobiography

Abstract

Anna Jameson and Mary Howitt, two Victorian professional women of letters, unusually chose to express their spiritual autobiographies through the popular narrative of childhood. They interpreted their childhood experience to embody and promote their adult religious views, Jameson in her 1854 ‘Revelation of Childhood’ and Howitt in her 1889 Autobiography. Both writers deploy images of childhood as popularised through Romantic discourse to achieve this. The child's association with innocence and natural wisdom lends authority to their views, and the idealisation of childhood imagination in particular lends itself to express the adult writers' commitment to ‘Romantic’ religion. Both use the childhood spiritual autobiography to protest against dogmatic, formalised religion in the name of a spirituality based on imagination and feeling. These self-constructions have feminist implications as the women reject patriarchal authorities to form independent religious views, and to implicitly claim a spiritual authority denied women in formal religious argument. These narratives thus constitute a striking intervention into Victorian faith debates, as well as forming a distinctive contribution to traditions of women's self-writing, and of Victorian spiritual autobiography.