Abstract
This thesis explores the Romantic representation of femininity in relation to elements of
the Western esoteric tradition. In particular, it discusses the presence of Gnostic themes
and gender imagery and the ways in which Romantic writers incorporated these concepts
into their works as a means of articulating discourses that could challenge mainstream
trends. I propose that Romantic writers engaged with an image of the feminine that
elevated the female within the epistemological hierarchies of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and whose precedents lie in the traditions of Gnosticism and other esoteric
schools of thought. This feminine image resurfaced within dissenting movements like the
Moravians, Behmenists and Swedenborgians, who emphasised the feminine aspects of
God and creation.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these movements, and the
ideas they espoused, became intertwined with apocalyptic concepts which entailed the
spiritual renewal and the betterment of humanity, and in which the feminine was a central
component and catalyst. These concepts acquired greater socio-political significance
during and post-Revolution and, within this socio-political climate, Romantic writers
challenged the binary constructions of gender and epistemological hierarchies. This thesis
demonstrates the ways in which Romantic writers—S.T. Coleridge, William Blake, Mary
Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the transitional figure, Elizabeth Barrett Browning—
incorporated alternative religious representations of gender into their writings in ways that
subverted established discourse, depicting the feminine as a source of spiritual wisdom and
creative transcendence, a mode of representation that mirrors such figures as the Gnostic
Sophia.