MARY CHOLMONDELEY'S STRUGGLE TOWARDS THE HIGHER LIFE: DIFFUSIVE CHRISTIANITY, GENDER AND WRITING IN RED POTTAGE (1899)
Abstract
The perception of Mary Cholmondeley as a New Woman writer is largely based on the strength of the popularity of her best seller, Red Pottage, which was published in 1899. In this essay, Red Pottage is explored through an examination of the significance of Cholmondeley's religious beliefs which dissent from the traditional Anglicanism in which, as a pastor's daughter, she was raised. By locating the novel within the religious milieu of the 1890s, I demonstrate that the novel's representation of gender in late-Victorian society, and the quasi-religious and gendered sense of writerly vocation the narrative esteems, are not only strongly informed by Cholmondeley's diffusive Christianity, but that the novel's foregrounded religious values plausibly account for its more favourable critical reception in comparison to many of Cholmondeley's New Woman contemporaries whose fiction was invariably and often stridently censured.