"Through a series of case studies examining three major branches of Victorian Christianity, this volume makes groundbreaking connections between desire and suffering in nineteenth-century English literature and culture. In the age of "progress," alongside the Darwinian revolution, the women's suffrage movement, and the march of industrialization ran a seemingly paradoxical fascination with a dark, erotically suggestive side of religious devotion: the figuration of the Christian God as a heavenly bridegroom who doles out punishment to his bride, the individual soul. Unsurprisingly, the model of a punitive deity-husband and a dutifully submissive wife proved to be a convenient rhetorical tool by which to defend against burgeoning nineteenth-century campaigns for women's rights and challenges to Church authority. More remarkably, however, in the hands of certain writers it provided a means of resisting patriarchal institutions, interrogating ideological distinctions between science and religion, and positing new, non-binary gender identities" --