Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Mystic Moderns examines the responses of three British authorsEvelyn Underhill (18751941), May Sinclair (18631946), and Mary Webb (18811927)to the emerging modernity of the long early twentieth-century moment encompassing the First World War. As they explored divergent but overlapping understandings of what mystical experience might be, these authors rejected claims that modernitys celebration of the secular and rational left no place for the mystical; rather, they countered, sensitivity to a greater reality could both establish and validate personal agency, and was integral to their identities as modern women. Their preoccupations with the dynamism of human connection drew on prevailing ideas of vital energy or life force developed by Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson in ways that channeled modernitys erotic energy of change. By using their fiction to describe new, self-authenticating forms of mysticism separate from either the prevailing orthodoxy of establishment Christianity or the extreme heterodoxy of their eras enthusiasm for paranormal experimentation, they also contributed to the rise of a generic concept of spirituality. Mystic Moderns thus offers historical perspective on contemporary claims for self-constructed, non-institutional spiritual experience associated with the claim Im spiritual, not religious. Working as they did within the shadow of the First World War, Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb were, in the end, attempting to determine what might be of authentic value for a modern age marked by ubiquitous death. While not themselves utopian authors, each was touched by her eras complicated hunger for the best of all possible worlds. Their constructions of how an individual should be and act in the midst of modernity thus simultaneously projected visions of what that modernity itself should become.

Reviews

In the novels of three early twentieth century English women writersEvelyn Underhill, May Sinclair and Mary WebbThrall finds similarities and divergences in their various attempts to refute the notion that mysticism has no place in secular and rational modernity. Underhill defends a heroic mysticism, and Sinclair and Webb an erotic and natural mysticism, respectively. As such, they are pioneers of a "New Mysticism." All three focus on the authority of individual experience, the importance of psychology, the primacy of the life force, and the necessity of ethical purpose. Thrall is ploughing new terrain, the fruit of which will be of interest to historians, biographers, scholars of religious thought and of gender studies. Thrall's deep research and clear and accessible writing make Mystic Moderns an important and provocative contribution. -- Dana Greene, Dean Emerita of Oxford College of Emory University

Author Bio

James H. Thrall is a Knight Distinguished associate professor at Knox College.