This article discusses the presence of figures of thought in some well-known feminist essays by Virginia Woolf. The novelist and essayist was especially sensitive to the challenging situation of women throughout history as far as their personal and professional desire for equality in a male-centered society was concerned. Woolf tries to make readers aware of her feminist views by using expressive resources like figures of speech or schemes, tropes and figures of thought in her writing. Figures of thought can be defined as those specific gestures which are designed to interact with the audience. Their use is connected with the functional use of language in the sense that they may draw readers’ attention away from the textual content and toward the context. Since the essays chosen for this study were first read aloud or were written in the form of letters before being published, the appeal to audience may be more deliberate and thus effective. The figures analyzed are enallage of person, erotema, ecphonesis, prosopopeia, aposiopesis and prolepsis.

The Restoration poet Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) includes in her Poems on Several Occasions (1703) a short but important work, "Song: To Lerinda," that blends sacred and sexual love between two women. Better known to readers for her proto-feminist perspective in The Ladies Defense (1701), Chudleigh expresses outrage about the poor treatment of wives, though in this work she does not go so far as to suggest a same-sex union as an alternative to traditional marriage for women. Several shorter works in the Poems allude to unorthodox forms of spiritual or erotic experience for women, including "Song: To Lerinda," which, like the majority of her writing, demonstrates Chudleigh’s intellectual range and deep reading of classical philosophy. Willing to take risks in her poetry, Chudleigh re-imagines the Platonic homoerotic love ideal, which she revises to include women’s same-sex desire in the "Song." The imagined experience between the two women in the poem communicates an erotic and philosophical ideal of communal love that embraces rather than rejects physical pleasure as a means of accessing a higher spiritual realm. The love relationship between the women challenges hetero-normative social patterns, and the speaker suggests that same-sex desire is spiritually and sexually preferable for them.

Bernard Lonergan, SJ, has noted that an empty box does not know it is empty and does not care whether it is empty or full. An empty stomach, on the other hand, knows when it is empty and yearns for what will satisfy it. Flannery O’Connor’s stories present the reader with a parade of characters who are empty boxes in the process of becoming empty stomachs. William Lynch, SJ, said that many times such conversions result from stark encounters with the finite, thus accounting for the grotesque in O’Connor’s stories.

This article analyzes the emotional maturation of Louisa Gradgrind and Jane Eyre as they move from the extremes of repression and indulgence to expressive moderation. In comparing the emotional lives of the novels’ major and minor characters, it becomes clear that both stories ultimately endorse a Pauline ethic of anger – in stark contrast to the Victorian ideals of their time. In showing how Louisa and Jane navigated cultural mores to reach a place of healthy anger, these novels invite modern readers to do the same – to exercise similar discretion and righteous restraint to secure good and meaningful endings to their lives.

The article offers a new reading of the central portion of Wilde's famous prison letter, which I call the letter's "spiritual center." In this central section, Wilde contemplates his future and expresses his desire to start a new life, a Vita nuova. As he works to envision in writing a future that can integrate the suffering of his prison experience, he outlines a spiritual vision that is both startlingly original, and informed by varied religious traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, and the British Occultist movement. In this article, I provide a careful reading of the four tasks Wilde sets out for himself to serve as the foundation for his Vita nuova. In order to better understand the context for Wilde's spiritual writing, I also explore briefly the religious and spiritual influences of the author's life. I conclude with a consideration of the values which underlie Wilde's four tasks, and the spiritual portion of his letter in general; namely, individual self-realization, suffering, and acceptance. Taken together, my article's contextual study and attentive reading of De Profundis's spiritual center offer a new understanding of both Wilde's practical spirituality and the spiritual milieu of the fin-de-siècle.

Paul A. Lacey’s rich meditation on the importance of reading and re-reading offers sage perspective on Henry James’s The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady. Waxing wise on W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and A. E. Housman, Lacey’s essay provides a reason not to lose touch with the works we love to read and re-read.