From the editor.(Editorial)

In this issue, we are pleased to publish four essays that focus on the relation between women, faith, and writing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, France, and America. The essays focus on poetry and fiction and explore the themes of transgression, incarnation, spirituality, sexuality, and the relation of the female artist / writer / poet to literary and religious tradition.

In her essay, "'Mine Earthly Heart Should Dare': Elizabeth Barrett's Devotional Poetry" Heather Shippen Cianciola examines Barrett's 1838 volume, The Seraphim and Other Poems. Barrett's willingness to challenge the poetic and religious establishments by publishing poetry in the devotional mode reveals her courage, conviction, and talent. In her "Preface" to The Seraphim, Barrett questions Samuel Johnson's influential argument that religious poetry was not "poetical:' In doing so, Barrett not only pushes the boundaries of poetic discourse, she also carves out new ground for female poets. Barrett daringly injects the sacred into her poetry, despite the social mores of her time that excluded women from theological discourse. The very title of her collection, The Seraphim, claims the sacred as subject matter. Barrett's call for a new language in poetry and her implied critique of gender discrimination provided a groundbreaking path for generations of women writers.

Tracing the influence of Alphonse de Lamartine upon Therese of Lisieux, Mary Frances Dorschell argues that Therese both absorbed and transformed Romantic themes into her own spiritual vision, a vision deeply inflected by her faith. Raised in a pious Catholic household, Therese would listen to her father, Louis Martin, sing and recite poetry each evening. Lamartine's book of poems, Meditations poetiques, was one of his favorites. Dorschell argues that Therese was influenced by these poems and by Romantic poetic tradition, but that Therese's very different understanding of God, of nature, and of love resulted in a poetry that comes out of the Romantic tradition, yet is more akin to the Song of Songs or the work of St. John of the Cross. Because Therese lived a cloistered life in a Carmelite Monastery, her poetry re-envisions relationships between lovers as those between Christ and his bride (Therese), the natural world, time, and the afterlife.

The "split between body and soul" that Edith Wharton deplores in the religious practices of her ...