Nonconformist women writers for the most part exemplify the variety of traditions present among women writers in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Until recently, many women writing from within an evangelical culture have largely been ignored by literary historians, even though attitudes of resistance to the demands of patriarchal society find a surprisingly natural voice within a sociable, collaborative model of artistic expression valorized by the men as much as the women within many dissenting literary circles. Coteries of Nonconformist women, such as the Steele Circle in the West Country, embraced a collaborative, sociable model of manuscript culture in which individual writers circulated their writings within the circle and received, transcribed, and sometimes edited the works of the other members. Like their Bluestocking and Unitarian counterparts, Evangelical and Calvinist women writers met often in each other’s homes, maintained lengthy correspondences, commemorated their friendships in poetry, and served as editors, copyists, and critics of each other’s writings. These women were intelligent, educated, and creative, contributing to popular monthly magazines and occasionally overseeing the publications of selected poems and prose pieces.  They also emulated the Bluestockings and Unitarians in their emphasis upon exhibiting a proper sensibility in their writings, maintaining economic independence as writers, and creating and sustaining a vibrant literary, religious, and intellectual community.

        Though faith was important to them, women writers from within the Calvinist tradition did not allow their Nonconformity to influence their attitude toward British culture to such a degree that they separated from it as necessarily “worldly.” They were neither “worldly” nor “otherworldly”; their embrace of literary culture never strayed so far from their faith that they could not apply spiritual lessons to their daily lives, easily combining faith and culture in their poems, letters, and diaries. Matthew Arnold’s complaint that nonconformists (he had in mind Calvinists and Methodists) were moral, social, and intellectual “Philistines” devoid of “sweetness and light,” speaks more to his own latent prejudices than to any vital knowledge of nonconformity after Defoe. In fact, the chief poetic heirs of Milton among British Nonconformists between 1650 and 1850 were not men but women. 

        A large portion of women’s writings, especially poetry, was either published anonymously or remained in manuscript. In the eighteenth century, women’s manuscripts were often devalued and discarded, even by family members, on the basis of gender; those manuscripts that did survive were routinely relegated by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary historians to the realm of domesticity, devoid of scholarly interest and destined for oblivion. Though most of Mary Scott’s manuscript poetry has been lost or destroyed, her surviving unpublished poems and prose writings, when added to those of Anne Steele, Mary Steele, and the other members of the three generations of the Steele circle, comprise one of the largest extant manuscript collections of any group of eighteenth-century Nonconformist women writers, a testament to the quality of their work and the value placed upon their manuscripts by their descendants. These manuscripts are primarily held by the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford, and in 2011 a substantial portion of these collections were published in my 8-volume series, Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011). These artifacts, created in bedrooms and parlors, preserved in attics and archives, and now presented in a modern printed edition, speak to the abilities of these women to rise above the demands of domesticity and engage the life of the mind, the imagination, and the heart as conscious artists. As representatives of a female tradition of scribal coteries immersed in informal literary forms, they can now speak to a modern generation of readers in their own voices, voices no longer silenced by or buried in anonymity or obscurity.

Nonconformist women writers were keenly aware of their place within a tradition that included Elizabeth Singer Rowe of Frome. Rowe (1674–1737), who published as “Philomela,” was the daughter of an Independent minister from Ilchester (and later Frome), Somerset; at 36 she married Thomas Rowe (1687–1715), an Independent minister and educator from London and 13 years her junior. Inspired by a coterie of friends and correspondents, including several aristocrats, prominent writers, and Nonconformist ministers such as Isaac Watts, Rowe’s writings reveal an extensive literary knowledge and devotion to piety that connected her to her Nonconformist roots.  Shortly before her death, however, another nonconformist woman writer emerged. Anne Dutton (1692–1765), a Baptist women writer from Northampton, was even more prolific than Rowe. Most of her writings are in prose and often, like Rowe, in the form of letters, but in 1734 she published A Narration of the Wonders of Grace in Verse, which also included “A Poem on the Special Work of the Spirit in the Hearts of the Elect” and a collection of 61 hymns. Dutton wrote a defense of her right as a Baptist woman to publish her thoughts on certain matters of Calvinist doctrine and church practice, many tenets of which were echoed by Jane Attwater in several of her prose pieces c. 1774–90 (click here to read one of these works) as well as by the London Baptist poet and polemicist Maria de Fleury (1752/53-1792) in An Answer to the Daughter’s Defence of her Father, Addressed to her Father Himself (1788).

        The practice of nonconformist women writing from within a Calvinist tradition is part of a legacy that began in the mid-seventeenth century with three women—Anna Trapnel (fl. 1630–54), Katherine Sutton (fl. 1630–63), and Anne Bradstreet (1612–72). The first two were English Baptists, the latter a Puritan Congregationalist born in England but whose writings originated from America. Trapnel was a Fifth Monarchist whose The Cry of a Stone appeared in London in 1654, a collection of prayers and “spiritual songs” that, though coming from the pen of a visionary prophetess, nevertheless served as a prototype of the hymnody that such Baptist figures as Hanserd Knollys (d. 1691) and Benjamin Keach (1640–1704) would soon champion as suitable for public worship. At some point in the 1650s, Sutton became a member of Knollys’s congregation (probably during his time in Lincolnshire) and immigrated with him and other members of his congregation to Rotterdam in 1660. Knollys returned to England in 1664, but not before assisting Sutton in publishing A Christian Woman’s Experiences of the Glorious Working of God’s Free Grace, Published for the Edification of Others, a spiritual autobiography interspersed with a small collection of hymns, what she describes as extemporaneous, spirit-led effusions, a term Mary Steele, Jane Attwater, and Elizabeth Coltman will also employ a century later. Knollys wrote the Introduction to Sutton’s work, noting that her words had been the “effectual means of the conversion of many,” a public avowal of her self-professed gifts of singing, prayer, and prophesy. 

        In contrast to Trapnel and Sutton, Anne Bradstreet serves as the prototype of the orthodox Calvinist woman writer, a tradition that will culminate in the work of Dutton, Anne Steele, Maria de Fleury, and Maria Grace Saffery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even from colonial America, Bradstreet spoke to a larger segment of seventeenth-century British society than her contemporary prophetesses. A member of one of the leading Puritan families in the first half-century of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Bradstreet maintained a large household while still managing to compose a substantial body of poetry and prose meditations between 1630 and her death in 1672. Like Sutton and the women within the Steele circle, Bradstreet’s poems on religious, domestic, and political topics received the approval of a significant contemporary male audience. Her first collection of poems, The Tenth Muse, emerged from a manuscript coterie, much like the poetry of the Steele circle a century later, and was published in London by her brother-in-law in 1650 and dedicated to her father, just as Mary Steele would dedicate Danebury to her father in 1779. The Tenth Muse was prefaced by poems composed by some of London’s leading Puritan ministers; similarly, Anne Steele’s poems were praised by a variety of Baptist and Presbyterian ministers during her lifetime. Bradstreet’s poems in The Tenth Muse, her additional poems published in Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (Boston, 1678), and her previously unpublished poems and prose meditations that first appeared in John Harvard Ellis’s 1867 edition reflect topics frequently employed by the women of the Steele circle and other Nonconformist women writers of the eighteenth century: history, contemporary politics, love, death, religion, nature, sickness, affliction, childbirth, and the feminist impulse to defend a woman’s right to be a writer and poet. 

  Like Bradstreet, the women writers of the Steele circle move easily between the secular and sacred, public and private, maintaining the delicate balance between aesthetic pleasure and spiritual edification, between human and divine knowledge. Such an aesthetic describes the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, as well as the religious poetry of the women of the Steele circle between 1766 and 1840, an aesthetic that, despite its occasional didacticism, insisted on maintaining a proper balance between truth and art, edification and enjoyment. Though nonconformist women writers used many literary devices to achieve their end, their aesthetic purpose remained constant: they sought to present divine truth by means of a sincere heart, grounded in the Word, for the godly edification of their readers, not forbidding, however, an inherent aesthetic pleasure in literature that could serve as a fitting helpmeet for edification or, in some cases, a profitable and permissible end in itself.

Timothy Whelan