Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement is the first book to be devoted entirely to Sara Coleridge’s religious writings. It presents extracts from important religious works which have remained unpublished since the 1840s. These writings represent a bold intervention by a woman writer in the public spheres of academia and the Church, in the genre of religious writing which was a masculine preserve (as opposed to the genres of religious fiction and poetry). They offer the most original and systematic critique of Tractarian theology to appear in the 1840s. Sara Coleridge’s assertion of religious inclusivity and liberty of conscience is based on a radically Protestant theology underpinned by a Kantian epistemology. The book also presents substantial extracts from her unpublished masterpiece Dialogues on Regeneration (the equivalent of her father’s Opus Maximum) which show her remarkable literary originality and the continuing development of her innovative religious thought.

Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement is the first book to be devoted entirely to Sara Coleridge’s religious writings. It presents extracts from important religious works which have remained unpublished since the 1840s. These writings represent a bold intervention by a woman writer in the public spheres of academia and the Church, in the genre of religious writing which was a masculine preserve (as opposed to the genres of religious fiction and poetry). They offer the most original and systematic critique of Tractarian theology to appear in the 1840s. Sara Coleridge’s assertion of religious inclusivity and liberty of conscience is based on a radically Protestant theology underpinned by a Kantian epistemology. The book also presents substantial extracts from her unpublished masterpiece Dialogues on Regeneration (the equivalent of her father’s Opus Maximum) which show her remarkable literary originality and the continuing development of her innovative religious thought.

This book presents a fundamental reassessment of Sara Coleridge. It examines her achievements as an author in the public sphere, and celebrates her interventions in what was a masculine genre of religious polemics. Sara Coleridge the religious author was the peer of such major figures as John Henry Newman and F. D. Maurice, and recognized as such by contemporaries. Her strategic negotiations with conventions of gender and authorship were subtle and successful. In this rediscovery of Sara Coleridge the author revises perspectives upon her literary relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Far from sacrificing her opportunities in service of her father’s memory, her rationale is to exploit his metaphysics in original religious writings that engage with urgent controversies of her own times. Sara Coleridge critiques the Oxford theology of Newman and his colleagues for authoritarian and elitist tendencies, and for creating a negative culture in religious discourse. In response, she experiments with methodologies of collaborative, dialogic exchange, in which form as much as content will promote liberal, inclusive and productive encounters. She develops this agenda in her major religious work, the unpublished Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), which this book examines in its penultimate chapter.

Known as the daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Coleridge's manuscripts, letters, and other writings reveal an original thinker in dialogue with major literary and cultural figures of nineteenth-century England. Here, her writings on beauty, education, and faith uncover aspects of Romantic and Victorian literature, philosophy, and theology.

Sara Coleridge (1802-1852), daughter of the poet, was a woman of exceptional intellectual energy. After she published two books before she was twenty-two, she became the editor and promoter of her father's works, marketing them as the philosophic cure to the social ills of the times.

It has long been accepted that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected the Unitarianism of his youth and returned to the Church of England, he did so while accepting a general Christian orthodoxy. Christopher Corbin clarifies Coleridge’s religious identity and argues that while Coleridge’s Christian orthodoxy may have been sui generis, it was closely aligned with moderate Anglican Evangelicalism. Approaching religious identity as a kind of culture that includes distinct forms of language and networks of affiliation in addition to beliefs and practices, this book looks for the distinguishable movements present in Coleridge’s Britain to more precisely locate his religious identity than can be done by appeals to traditional denominational divisions. Coleridge’s search for unity led him to desire and synthesize the "warmth" of heart religion (symbolized as Methodism) with the "light" of rationalism (symbolized as Socinianism), and the evangelicalism in the Church of England, being the most chastened of the movement, offered a fitting place from which this union of warmth and light could emerge. His religious identity not only included many of the defining Anglican Evangelical beliefs, such as an emphasis on original sin and the New Birth, but he also shared common polemical opponents, appropriated evangelical literary genres, developed a spirituality centered on the common evangelical emphases of prayer and introspection, and joined Evangelicals in rejecting baptismal regeneration. When placed in a chronological context, Coleridge’s form of Christian orthodoxy developed in conversation with Anglican Evangelicals; moreover, this relationship with Anglican Evangelicalism likely helped facilitate his return to the Church of England. Corbin not only demonstrates the similarities between Coleridge’s relationship to a form of evangelicalism with which most people have little familiarity, but also offers greater insight into the complexities and tensions of religious identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain as a whole.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.