Dr Jodie Marley is an independent scholar working on Romantic literature and art history. Her recent publications include a chapter on gender and sexuality in Seán O’Casey in Context (Cambridge University Press, ed. James Moran) and an article on W.B. Yeats and William Blake in the 1890s in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. She is a regular contributor to Global Blake’s online lecture series and podcast. Her first monograph, William Blake’s Mysticism: The Legacy of Prophetic Women, which we discuss below, was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.
1) How did you first become interested in William Blake?
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience was a set text for my first year of undergraduate studies. His illuminations’ luminous use of colour arrested me and pulled me back to my teenage years at Catholic school in a former convent (my family were early C20th Irish Catholic immigrants, though I’m no longer in the Church). My English teacher had Blake’s painting ‘The Circle of the Lustful’ from Dante’s Inferno as her desktop background, which often ended up projected across the wall: a strange choice given the crucifixes and Virgin statues in the corridors. I’d taken art to GCSE, specialising in silk painting and watercolour. They’re both temperamental mediums that glow softly when you get them right, particularly silk, translucent when backlit. I don’t wear much colour, but all my visual art, and the artists I admire the most, uses colour in a very striking way. Blake’s earliest use of watercolour wash in his prints in the 1790s – in the Songs, the Book of Thel, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell – reminded me of my own background. He seemed to articulate a mood I’d been trying to capture myself for years without knowing why.
2) How does your research define mysticism, and how does seeing William Blake as a mystic help us better understand his reception?
I was very intentional in defining mysticism at the start of the book, following the topic’s reputation in Blake studies. Northrop Frye’s (correct) observation that calling Blake a mystic creates confusion without further definition compelled me to come up with my own. My definition is probably closest to Glenn Alexander Magee’s, which, to summarise, describes mysticism as having a spiritual or visionary experience and then, crucially, sharing it with others, which connotes a kind of conversion process. This applies to most of Blake’s output, as well as academics’ definitions of millenarian prophecy.
Blake’s reputation as a millenarian prophet really took off in the late twentieth century and has only grown since, yet studies of Blake’s mysticism mostly petered out after Kathleen Raine. By my own definition, stated in my book’s conclusion, both prophecy and mysticism are interwoven. To see and hear God, to be compelled by him to share his word through prophecy: that’s a mystic experience. Not all mysticism is prophecy, but all prophecy is mysticism.
I’m so interested in the development of Blake’s reputation as a mystic in the nineteenth century because the word casts such a wide net, which can, as Frye said above, create confusion, because then Blake becomes too much, too loose. As you’ll find if you read my book, back then ‘mystic’ encompassed a range of artistic modes, influences, and assumptions that, today, have branched off and bloomed into many different, clearer subcategories of Blake studies. In the nineteenth century, ‘mystic’ was a way of explaining a range of traditions that Blake almost fit, without fully committing Blake to one mode. To re-vision Blake as a mystic today is to reaffirm his fluid, boundary-blurring nature as an artist, which, in my book, I find very compatible with reading Blake through a queer lens.
To summarise: my research’s purpose isn’t necessarily to see Blake as a mystic. Rather, it is to determine why Blake’s works and influences merit that definition.
3) In what ways did Blake’s works and their influences intersect with those of women prophets such as Dorothy Gott and Joanna Southcott?
The key thing to understand about the relationship between Blake’s, Gott’s, and Southcott’s works is that they all lived in overlapping spiritual communities, so naturally, they had many shared influences. Blake and Gott, for example, attended the same Swedenborg meeting, demonstrating a shared affinity for his works. Most crucially, the intersection of influences came from gathering with people with similar interests. It was a culture rooted in communal discussion and debate rather than solitary reading and reflection – which is what Yeats’ work on Blake’s occult influences never quite captures. Occult writers such as alchemical philosopher Jacob Boehme and, yes, Swedenborg (reclaimed for the occult by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn syllabi in the 1890s) were popular in Blake’s time, as Robert Rix’s book attests, but were encountered in a contemporary, politicised context.
This chaotic Romantic conversational culture is best exemplified in Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary records of Blake’s conversations with his friend, engraver William Sharp. Blake and Robinson skewer Sharp’s fickle prophetic allegiances, first to Richard Brothers, then to Joanna Southcott, critiquing both prophets. Southcott herself derided Brothers in A Dispute Between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness (1802), citing his imprisonment as evidence of his prophetic weakness, rather than a logical consequence of prophesying against the political establishment.
Regarding their published works, Blake explicitly references Southcott in his four-line Notebook poem ‘On the Virginity of Johanna [sic] Southcott’ (c. 1801-3). Blake mimics Southcott’s idiosyncratic use of rhyme to prophesise, alluding to her favourite theme of her own virtuous virginity. The fragment shows a distinct familiarity with her published work. Blake does not name Gott, yet there is an eerie overlap of imagery and metaphor between their works, which is particularly significant given they attended the same Swedenborg group and published at the same time (Southcott was a little later). Gott and Blake use the same worm and grave imagery for the same themes of gender, humility, and spiritual service. The Book of Thel is the most evident demonstration of their works’ intersection, and of Gott’s influence.
4) What were the most important things that W.B. Yeats and his circle drew from Blake?
From a general perspective, Blake represented a predecessor for the Yeats circle. He was, for them, an artist-mystic, who shared their interests and their vocation. Yeats specifically promoted this view. It validated his circle’ work, and positioned them as inheritors of Blake’s cultural legacy, the next generation in a lineage passed down from Boehme, to Swedenborg, to Blake, to the Celtic Twilight.
W. B. Yeats, with Edwin J. Ellis, were the first Blake scholars to systematise Blake’s esoteric influences. Yeats gave specific and detailed examples of where these appeared in Blake’s work. Yet his criticism is highly influenced by the Golden Dawn’s secret society ethos. It often obscures rather than clarifies, as if only a coterie of Blake initiates were truly worthy of understanding Blake in full. Often, it reflects Yeats’ own desire for a philosophical system of spiritual belief, imposing a structure onto Blake that was not necessarily there. Yeats drew from Blake the conviction to create his own mythopoetic system of contraries and guiding entities. This achieved its final form in A Vision, which his wife George Yeats channelled, shouldering the actual prophetic workload.
George Russell ‘Æ’ is a curious figure as, like Blake, Yeats imposed a mystical reputation on him that never quite rubbed off. Russell was involved in several intersecting spiritual communities and wrote poetry, prose, drama, and political journalism, whilst painting and illustrating. His letters have a Blakean bluntness at odds with his sage-like image in Yeats’ memoirs. He was familiar with Blake’s works but leaned less self-consciously on them than Yeats. Blake was, for Russell, one of many influences, including some overlap with Blake’s own (Boehme) and some unique to his late nineteenth-century milieu (H. P. Blavatsky). Because of the increased interest in and respect for Blake’s work in the late nineteenth century, Russell profited from his Blakean associations, and perhaps for this reason, his work was seen as a little less strange.
William Sharp/Fiona Macleod, like Russell, took elements of Blake’s style and themes and transmuted them into their own work. Sharp was a significant figure in late nineteenth-century literary criticism, quietly respected, productive, and well-connected to several Blake collectors, including the Rossettis and William Bell Scott. He was part of the Golden Dawn and learned in esoterica. Sharp wrote and identified as the female author Macleod, and it is in their creative writing the Blake influence is most apparent. Sharp and Macleod particularly draw on Blake’s lamenting, female prophetic figures as models for their heroines, and his multi-bodied concepts of gender in both creative and personal capacities.
5) What new projects are you currently developing?
I’m currently working on two new projects. Both emerged from my monograph’s Fiona Macleod research.
The first studies the careers of several artists who were apprenticed to the Edinburgh engraver Robert Scott and who trained at his workshop, which was one of the largest and most influential in Edinburgh at the time. Part of this project was funded by my Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow’s Special Collections last year, plus a BARS Stephen Copley Award in December 2024. Sharp/Macleod was friends with Scott’s youngest son, William Bell Scott, which is how I first discovered the family’s fascinating history. I’m presenting a paper at the BARS Birmingham conference this year drawing on my archival research on Scottish Romantic astronomical engravings and Glasgow’s intellectual culture in the early nineteenth century, so hopefully I’ll see some of you there.
My second project again originates in my Sharp/Macleod research. It tracks their influence as a Romanticist literary critic in the nineteenth century, detailing their contributions to our reception of several Romantic poets.