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
10 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
15 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
20 intervention into Victorian faith debates, as well as forming a distinctive
contribution to traditions of women’s self-writing, and of Victorian spiritual
autobiography.