The representation and reappraisal of St. Monica of Hippo in nineteenth-century women's writing

Since she was commemorated as a saint in 387, Monica of Hippo has come to represent ideals of motherhood to successive generations. This article considers how three nineteenth-century women writers – Anna Jameson, Christina Rossetti, and Harriet Beecher Stowe – engage with this legacy to offer new ways of imagining the empowering social potential of faith. In my analysis, I indicate how they contribute to the incarnation-inflected discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century and provide a helpful backdrop to understanding recent feminist appraisals of Augustine.