Occult Modernism and the Radical Reform of the Family: Female Empowerment in the Magical Fiction of Four Women Writers 1890 - 1940

This thesis will demonstrate how women writers in the period 1890-1940 used the intersection of occultism and modernism to create a place of female power and agency, in which they disrupted societal expectations of women’s roles, especially in the traditional sphere of home and family. The influence of feminist occultism on the modern family in the early twentieth century has not been widely studied from a scholarly perspective and it is a research gap which I aim to contribute towards filling. The intersection of literary modernism and occultism that this thesis demonstrates informed notions of women’s empowerment and the radical reform of the family, which I argue were posited in Florence Farr’s <em style="color:black;">The Dancing Faun&lt;/em&gt; (1893), Mary Butts’s <em style="color:black;">Armed with Madness&lt;/em&gt; (1928), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s <em style="color:black;">Lolly Willowes or The Loving Huntsman&lt;/em&gt; (1926) and P.L. Travers’ <em style="color:black;">Mary Poppins&lt;/em&gt; (1934) and <em style="color:black;">Mary Poppins Comes Back&lt;/em&gt; (1935). I demonstrate how these women engaged with a variety of esoteric, magical and occult domains as liberating, feminist empowering practices. For the purposes of this thesis, I have gathered unorthodox and variously secret and/or initiatory spiritual practices, including occultism, magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, and Theosophy under the general heading of ‘the occult’, referring to its meaning as ‘hidden’ and extending this descriptor to embrace ‘unorthodox and excluded’ from mainstream culture and religious belief. I discuss the development of Western esotericism as a new academic field that has begun the reclaiming of historical occult disciplines for the academy, creating new opportunities for the transvaluation of occult influences on literature and Western esotericism’s place in literary studies, which provides the context for the development of my thesis. </em></em></em></em></em>