ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, when nineteenth-century women writers wrote in the genres of children’s fiction and governess literature, especially when encouraged by the religious publishing houses, this was a missionary activity. Moreover, it argues that the ‘holy child’ and governess characters of these literary forms were often domestic versions of the female missionary. The chapter explores the evangelical tracts of Martha Sherwood and Hesba Stretton to show how holy child characters such as Sherwood’s Little Henry embodied the feminine characteristics of the ideal female missionary as she was constructed by religious life writing. Depicted as passive angels, these characters’ self-sacrificial deaths, in their sentiment and pathos, have the power to convert others; as do the emotional conversion relationships they construct with adults. The chapter also argues that women writers of governess fiction, such as Dinah Craik, explored the implications of the female missionary figure for their own identities, and stressed the heroism and nobility of single women’s sacrifice of love and marriage for a cause. However, their use of psychological realism to depict female characters’ inner lives increasingly revealed an unconscious rebellion against the ideal of missionary self-sacrifice for women.
