Divine Feminine

An elegant and closely argued work.

Dixon writes clearly and elegantly and has carved her subject into coherent and attractively presented chapters. The central chapters are packed with subtle and interesting insights into how feminism, religious culture, and theosophical and spiritualist thought interacted in the intellectual turbulence of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The discussion of the links btween religion and racial ideas is a fascinating addition to a much-neglected subject.

Dixon has written a provocative and timely book.. She asks important questions about the relationship of politics and spirituality, and offers sensitively nuanced answers that draw upon the past but contain meaning for the present.

Dixon's attention to the role of spirituality in modern life, and her insistence that the spiritual is always constituted in relation to a specific historical moment, offers new and exciting ways of thinking not only about late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain but also about the relationship of politics and religion in our own times.

In revealing the long-neglected intersection of spiritualism and feminist politics, Dixon's book will prompt a more general reconsideration of the relations of religious and political transformation in the period.

An exemplary historical account of spirituality as a cultural formation... It develops with great subtlety recent accounts of English feminism, examining the role of class and racial privilege in feminist interventions in progressive politics and the imperial project.

Dixon has opened up a great new avenue of investigation in her excellent book by challenging the secularist bias of analysis of the feminist movement.

Startling and original... An important contribution of the book is to show how the constantly shifting construction of gender and sexuality among theosophists was related to notions of race and class.

Joy Dixon's meticulous and brilliant study of the relationship between the feminist movement and esoteric (alternative) spirituality in England stands as a model for how such work ought be undertaken in the future.

A stimulating and original study. Clearly written and well researched.

In this imaginatively conceived, extensively researched, and insightfully analyzed study, Dixon convincingly argues the complicated but crucial connections between the spiritual and the political during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Divine Feminine is a highly original and substantial contribution to the fields of English feminism and religion.