Persephone Rises, 1860–1927

Margot K. Louis, who died in August 2007, was Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She was the author of Swinburne and His Gods (1990) and numerous articles on Victorian poetry and mythography.

’Louis adroitly reads treatments of Persephone in poetry, novels, classical studies, and the history of religion. She shows the figure of the abducted goddess in Greek mystery cult and myth to be both index of and catalyst for changing views of gender, culture, religion, marriage, and sexuality in American and European societies during the time period studied. The book thus makes an important contribution to various contemporary disciplines and merits a wide audience... Highly recommended. All readers.’ Choice ’Persephone Rises, completed just days before Louis's death, looks at the uses made of the story, and stands as a fitting testament to her scholarship. The study contains a valuable analysis of classical sources, and charts the myth's subsequent passage through Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton to the Romantics, but Louis's core interest is the twilight world of Victorian spirituality.’ Times Literary Supplement '... this jargon-free study is worthwhile reading and meditating.' Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 'Broad in scope yet succinct in exposition, Persephone Rises explores with the rigor of a classicist and the sensitivity of a humanist the many dimensions of its eponymous Greek mythical figure in Victorian and early Modernist literature, situating these manifestations within antique as well as Medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic literary history... Louis succeeds in the difficult task of situating what is essentially an ahistorical narrative body within the historical spaces that contemporary criticism increasingly occupies.' International Journal of the Classical Tradition

• Contents: Foreword; Preface; Introduction: gods and mysteries: the revival of paganism and the remaking of mythography through the 19th century; A myth appropriated: Greek Persephone to romantic Proserpine; Marriage by capture and the captive wife in Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell; Proserpine and pessimism: goddesses of death, life, and language from Swinburne to Wharton; The virgin with the sheaf: fertility, ritual, and imagination in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and My Antonia; 'I am Koré': the modernist underworld and the rising Persephone; Appendices; Index.