This book makes an important and unprecedented contribution to our appreciation of the diverse ways in which nineteenth-century women writers stressed the need for embodied participation in the divine through prayer and living prayerfully.

Joshua King, Professor of English and Director of Environmental Humanities, Baylor University, USA

Ludlow's work challenges critical commonplaces which frame women writers' engagement with faith as an escape from the self, the body, and the pressing social and political concerns of their day. Instead, she demonstrates how these writers' explorations of Christian prayer as an embodied practice grounded them more fully in the world.

This timely intervention in nineteenth-century studies is essential reading for scholars interested in rethinking and revaluing the relationship between the spiritual and the material in women's writing and thinking.

Dr Dinah Roe, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford Brookes University