Preface

Summary

Sara Coleridge's religious writings are significant interventions in the controversies of her times and the major achievement of her authorial career. Yet, they are virtually unknown and unread. When Peter Swaab compiled his selection of Sara Coleridge's literary criticism, he took a ‘pragmatic decision to omit’ extracts from her ‘theological works’, which, he maintained, require specialist treatment and ‘deserve a separate volume of their own’ (Criticism, xxxi). Lost from view for more than 160 years, Sara Coleridge's religious writings constitute a remarkable body of work. In restoring a selection of them to light, this volume seeks to fill a notable gap in our knowledge of nineteenth-century theological literature.

Names and Authorial Status: ‘Coleridge’ and ‘STC’

In presenting this selection of Sara Coleridge's religious writings, I refer to her as Coleridge and to her father as STC. It would be belittling to Sara Coleridge, and contrary to my intention to show her as a major religious writer of the period of the Oxford Movement, if I were to use her first name in a book devoted to her theological work. I am aware of the potential for confusion in referring, in the same work, to the Romantic poet and metaphysician Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and to the Victorian religious philosopher Sara Coleridge. I have taken precautions to avoid moments of ambiguity, therefore, while upholding Sara Coleridge's status as an author and theologian in her own right.

Organization of This Book

The extracts from Coleridge's religious writings are presented in the order in which the works from which they are taken were produced. I have adopted this chronological structure in order to show Coleridge's literary and intellectual development in response to her politico-religious times of rapid change and deepening division. The Socratic form of her Dialogues on Regeneration, viewed in the light of ‘On Rationalism’, reflects at once Coleridge's literary development and her progression as a religious thinker.

I contextualize each passage by means of a short introduction in italics; in some cases, I summarize briefly how an argument develops from the point at which an extract ends. I seek to convey the scope and development of ideas in each work in Part One.