Introduction

This chapter contextualises the study of the nineteenth-century female missionary character and narrative within the fields of women’s studies and mission history. Within a discussion of how religion has been treated in feminist literary studies and women’s history, it contends that studying the female missionary sheds valuable light on Victorian gender ideology. It argues that the figure complicates ideas of femininity and separate spheres through the concept of missionary domesticity and through the themes of the female missionary narrative, including marriage, female friendship, self-sacrifice and heroism. It also reveals the prevalent missionary culture of the mission societies that inspired literary characters such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and which encouraged women’s writing in the evangelical genres of female missionary biography and children’s tracts. In outlining the archival and published material used for this study, it discusses the place of emotion in women’s life writing and their religious practice and argues the significance of circulated religious writings, such as missionary newsletters, for the development of women’s networks and subjectivities.