Abstract

Anne Bronte's struggles with her faith, as presented in her religious poetry of the 1840s, are here framed in terms of the long tradition of Christian existentialism. Her poetry is considered as an expression of an alienated sensibility, in which she diagnoses the given conditions of being as profoundly, painfully disappointing. Bronte reasons from this state of feeling, to achieve a new commitment to living out a Christian life while devoid of emotional conviction in its premises. Read in the light of nineteenth- and twentieth-century existentialist philosophers, Bronte's poetry transcends its historical particularities to articulate a religious perspective based on emotional needs.