Faith, Feeling, Reality

Abstract

How are we to approach the religious poetry of Anne Brontë? Written in the 1840s, her collection of short lyrics and longer didactic verse appear somewhat alien to the modern reader. Drenched in the language of evangelical belief, the poems swing between spiritual ecstasy, guilt, doubt and resignation, demonstrating a religious intensity alien to the secular reader and even, I think, to many modern readers who do hold a position of faith. On first impressions, Brontë’s work appears bound to her historical moment, of significance only in relation to the religious discourses current in the early to mid-nineteenth century. We hear echoes of Methodist enthusiasm and the hymns of Charles Wesley, of Puritan self-disgust such as that evinced by William Cowper and John Bunyan, of the Romantic epiphany familiar to readers of Wordsworth, and of the agonised inquiry into God’s nature and existence which fed into the stream of Victorian doubt. If we assume, as does J.R. de J. Jackson, that the goal of the historicist critic is ‘to read past works of literature in the way in which they were read when they were new’ (quoted in Hawthorn 1996, 76), then it is in these contexts that Brontë’s work must be understood; as historically-minded critics, our task is to appreciate Brontë’s writing as a rich engagement with understandings of faith in her own era (see, for example, Styler 2010).