Writing Against the Grain: The Challenge of Modernism in the Autobiographical Writings of Frances Banks—Religious Educator

This article focuses on three genres in life writing as described by James Olney (narrative/memory, dialogue, and reverie) in Frances Banks’s writings to establish a composite understanding of her writings as life writing. Banks wrote an autobiography, educational texts, and a book on Western mystics. I include all these writings as part of her life writing. When read together all her writings reveal a person attempting to write herself into a positional response to the encroachment of modern materialism in education during the first half the twentieth. She draws from classical Christian ideas, mysticism and current esoteric spirituality.