In addition to providing an exciting new reading of Charlotte Bronte's classic, Jane Eyre, the book's methodology includes close reading a range of archival and underexamined published sources, providing readers with new understandings of Bronte's work and contexts. The book's range enables a story to be told about the enduring influence of the phenomenon of the female missionary on women biographers in the early decades of the nineteenth century, on famous women writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Olive Schreiner, and on women's college culture at the turn of the century. In unearthing important historical information on the representation of the female missionary, the book provides a valuable introduction to the under-explored topic of nineteenth-century missionary women, enriching knowledge of the period and opening up new areas for research. For the first time, this book explores literary representations of the nineteenth-century female missionary in the context of the new imperial history as well as histories of gender and religion. The book's challenge of an easy linear relationship between religion and gender, and between the domestic and missionary female represents a significant contribution to studies of nineteenth-century literature, gender and religion.

This four-volume historical resource provides new opportunities for investigating the relationship between religion, literature and society in Britain and its imperial territories by making accessible a diverse selection of harder-to-find primary sources. These include religious fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, sermons, travel writing, religious ephemera, unpublished notebooks and pamphlet literature. Spanning the long nineteenth century (c.1789-1914), the resource departs from older models of 'the Victorian crisis of faith' in order to open up new ways of conceptualising religion. This second volume is called 'Mission and Reform' and it considers the social and political importance of religious faith and practice as expressed through foreign and domestic mission and philanthropic and political movements at home and abroad.

Originally inspired by the digitisation of the autobiographical writings of Constance Maynard, this volume considers women's historical experience of sexuality through the frame of the history of emotions. Constance Maynard (1849-1935) rose to prominence as the first Mistress and Principal of Westfield College, holding that position from 1882 to 1913. However, her writings offer more than an insight into the movement for women's higher education. As pioneering feminist scholars such as Martha Vicinus have discovered, Maynard's life writings are a valuable source for scholars of gender and sexuality. Writing about her relationships with other women teachers and students, Maynard attempted to understand her emotions and desires within the frame of her evangelical religious culture. The contributions to this volume draw out the significance of Maynard's writings for the histories of gender, sexuality, religion, and the emotions. Interdisciplinary in nature, they use the approaches of literary studies, architecture studies, and life writing to understand Maynard and her historical significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.