Abstract

Josephine Butler, controversial and pioneering feminist reformer of the late nineteenth-century, never wrote an autobiography, but she articulated self-understandings indirectly through writing deeply self-reflexive constructions of others’ lives. While this strategy has been recognised in isolated biographies, I show Butler’s auto/biography as a serial process, comparing John Grey of Dilston (1869) with Catharine of Siena (1878) to show how Butler’s conceptions of herself changed significantly in the early part of her career. She moves from modelling herself on the gender-transcendent liberal reformer, to modelling herself on the radical female prophet, whose sex was a vital qualification for spiritual and political power. Finding she could no longer position her feminist campaign within the broad cause of Victorian liberal reform, Butler turned from her paternal examplar to a medieval female saint-prophet, whose authority was located in her outsider status and in her intrinsically womanly nature. This comparative discussion, enlightened by reference to Butler’s unpublished letters, shows Butler’s change from positioning her public work within the reform tradition of liberalism to that of apocalyptic feminism. It also sheds a new light on Victorian women’s coded strategies of self-representation, and more generically into the use of sequential biographies as vehicles for articulating changing self-conceptions.