Constance Naden

Clare Stainthorp, a specialist in Victorian literature and intellectual history, was the 2017-18 Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellow at Cardiff University. She has lectured at the University of Birmingham, where she completed a PhD in English Literature in 2017. Her research has been published in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture and Journal of Victorian Culture. Her next project focuses on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and periodical press, preliminary research for which has been supported by a Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

CONTENTS: Introduction: Unity in Diversity – Poetry, Philosophy and Science Meet – Critical Currents –Chapter 1: Intellectual Biography – Biography – Naden’s Education – Philosophical Networks – Contemporary Critical Reception – Situating Naden – Chapter 2: Scientist – Naden and the Scientific Imagination – Heliotropic Urges – Physics and Physiology – Situating Science – Chapter 3: Philosopher – Nonconformism – The Path to Freethought – A Synthetic Philosophy – ‘A Modern Apostle’ – Situating Philosophy – Chapter 4: Poet – Romanticism, Gender, Comedy – Naden’s Notebooks – Songs and Sonnets of Springtime – A Modern Apostle; The Elixir of Life; The Story of Clarice; and Other Poems – Situating Poetry – Conclusion: A Life Cut Short

«This book represents a much-needed, full-length study of the brilliant intellectual trail Constance Naden blazed as a student and scholar: of the many facets of her brilliant career, and of her expansive synthetic mode of thinking. Naden’s career interlaced so many issues and disciplines in such a fascinating way that, in this timely work, she acts as a case study for thinking about the value and practice of interdisciplinarity itself. This is an astute, lucid and illuminating analysis.» (Marion Thain, Professor of Literature and Culture, King’s College London)



«Stainthorp’s study of Constance Naden both reveals and revels in the interdependence of disciplines that was her subject’s tragically short-lived contribution to nineteenth-century thought. In doing so she thoughtfully synthesizes the variant parts of Naden’s intellectual life. The result is a book of insightful combinations and cross-readings which illuminate the unity in diversity that was Naden’s driving force.» (Martin Willis, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University and editor of the Journal of Literature and Science)



«This is an important, meticulously researched book. Stainthorp is marvellously alert to Naden’s desire to find unity in diversity in her writing. She puts Naden’s poetry, prose and unpublished notebooks to work and the result is a ground-breaking analysis of Naden’s synthetic thinking. A boon to scholars working on Naden.» (Ana Parejo Vadillo, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London)



«This is a rich, suggestive, and long overdue study of a life cut tragically short, and an insightful study of the intellectual intersections of multiple disciplines in the 1880s. Stainthorp achieves a powerful recalibration of Naden’s life and career, and promises to inspire a slew of
further studies on this fascinating figure. Equally, it yields an important
case study on the issue of interdisciplinarity at a critical period in its
history, and a specific and particularly ambitious approach to the longheld
problem of achieving ‘unity in diversity’.» (Adelene Buckland, Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 31, No. 3)