Dr Elizabeth Ludlow

Elizabeth’s research has largely focused on intersections of literature and religion in the nineteenth century with an emphasis on embodiment, ecology, and historicity. Her most recent monograph, Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Bloomsbury, 2025), considers how eight women writers provide accounts of prayer that stress the only way to experience and respond to something of the transcendent is through embracing lived experience and recognising the connectedness of all bodies. In detailing how these writers engage with new ways of thinking about faith, desire and the material world, Elizabeth argues that they offer models for ethical modes of being in the world and pave the way for later theologies of embodiment. Much of the book was written through a time of global crises brought about by climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and heightened international conflict; a time when interrogating connections between prayer, being, and action were more necessary than ever. A significant thread running through the book is a recognition of prayer as transgressive in that it enables one to imagine the possibility of a renewed world with different structure and different family connections: prayer declares that things shouldn’t be the way they are and looks to transformation and change. Following on from a section in the monograph on Adelaide Anne Procter, Elizabeth co-produced a podcast series with Amanda Vernon to celebrate Procter’s bicentenary (available via Apple and Spotify).

Elizabeth’s chapter for the collection that she co-edited with Koenraad Claes, The Nineteenth-Century Present: Literature, Print Culture and Historicity (Manchester UP, 2025), extends the reading of the prayers of commission and intercession in Josephine Butler’s life-writing in the final chapter of Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. Both chapters are underpinned by archival work made possible by a British Academy Small Grant for a project, ‘Expressions of Prayer, Praxis, and Christology in the Josephine Butler archives’, and considers how Butler’s reflexive hermeneutical methods anticipate more recent theologies.

Elizabeth’s most recent book is The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Routledge, 2026), which she co-edited with Rebecca Styler. This book brings together twenty-five chapters that address Gaskell’s works, networks, contexts, and legacies. Particular attention is paid throughout to the intersections between race, class, gender and religion in Gaskell’s fiction, as well as to the ongoing afterlife of her work in fiction, film, web-series, and fanfiction. Elizabeth’s own chapter for the collection considers Gaskell’s perception of the reverberations of the Kingdom of God in creaturely time and ordinary life and her vision of religion that emerges from communities of faith. The chapter extends previous work on Gaskell that Elizabeth had completed in several book chapters, journal articles, and a co-edited special issue (also with Rebecca Styler) of The Gaskell Journal in 2015.

Elizabeth’s previous books include Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century (ed, Palgrave, 2020).

Her current project explores a range of Victorian pamphlets and books produced to raise awareness and funds to forward an understanding of the part that literary texts played in the development of charities and in the work of fundraising.

Elizabeth has seen six PhD students through to successful completion as primary supervisor and four as secondary supervisor. She is particularly interested in supervising PhD research in literature and religion and in the literature of the long nineteenth-century. She currently teaches on the UG modules: ‘Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Environment’, ‘Nineteenth-Century Afterlives and Adaptations’, ‘Introduction to the Study of Literature and Writing’, and the Undergraduate Major Project. On the MA, she teaches on ‘Literature and Landscape’, ‘Research Methods in Practice’, and the MA Major Project.

• PhD English Literature, University of Warwick
• MA Victorian Literature and Culture, University of Reading
• BA English Literature and Language, University of Reading

Monographs

Ludlow, E. Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. Bloomsbury, 2025.

Ludlow, E. Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Edited Collections

Ludlow, E., and Styler, R. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Routledge, 2026.

Claes, K., and Ludlow, E., (eds), The Nineteenth-Century Present: Literature, Print Culture and Historicity. Manchester UP, 2025.

Ludlow, E. (ed), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Ludlow, E. and Styler, R. (eds), The Gaskell Journal, vol. 29. Special Issue on Shorter Fiction, 2015.

Journal Articles

Ludlow, E. “The High-Church branch of the Church of England.” Victorian Review, vol. 46, no. 2, 2020, pp. 149-152. https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2020.0037

Ludlow, E. “The Representation and Reappraisal of St. Monica of Hippo in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 69, no.4, 2020, pp. 528-548. https://doi.org/10.1353/chy.2020.0065

Ludlow, E. “Working-Class Methodism and Eschatological Anxiety in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction.” The Gaskell Journal, vol. 34, 2020, pp. 25-40.

Ludlow, E. “Prayer and the role of the “Soul-Artist” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Historical Fiction.” The Glass, vol. 31, no. 1, 2019, pp. 44-50.

Ludlow, E. “Elizabeth Gaskell’s early contributions to Household Words: The parabolic and the transformation of communities through “kinder understanding.” Victorian Review, vol. 41, no. 2, 2016, pp. 107-125. https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2016.0042

Ludlow, E. “Christina Rossetti’s Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets (1881): Exploring the Fearfulness of Forgiveness.” Literature Compass, vol. 11, no.2, 2014, pp. 84-93. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12127

Ludlow, E. “Christina Rossetti, Amy Levy, and the composition of roundels in late Victorian Bloomsbury: Poetic snapshots of city pageants. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 56, no. 1, 2013, pp. 83-103. https://doi.org/10.1353/elt.2013.0009

Chapters in edited books

Ludlow, E., “Elizabeth Gaskell and Religion: The Time of the Kingdom of God.” The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, edited by E. Ludlow and R. Styler, Routledge, 2026, pp. 226-239.

Ludlow, E. “Josephine Butler’s reconsideration of female saints: Eschatological conceptions of history and the dismantling of structural evil.” The Nineteenth-Century Present: Literature, Print Culture, and Historicity, edited by K. Claes and E. Ludlow, Manchester UP, 2025, pp. 238-256.

Ludlow, E. “Christina Rossetti and Anglican Figural Practice.” Anglican Readings of the Bible, edited by D. Nay, Lexham Press, 2021, pp. 307-324.

Ludlow, E. “Reimaging Personhood Before the Figure of Christ in the Victorian Early Christian Novel.” The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by E. Ludlow. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 163-176.

Ludlow, E. “‘There is great need for forgiveness in this world’: The Call for Reconciliation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers and A Dark Night’s Work.”  Reassessing Women’s Writing of the 1860s and 1870s, edited by A.E. Gavin and C.W.L. Oulton. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 75-88.

Ludlow, E. “Christina Rossetti: Her Identity in the Communion of Saints”, Sources of the Christian Self: A Cultural History of Christian Identity, edited by J. Houston and J. Zimmermann, Eerdmans, 2018, pp. 543-553.

Ludlow, E. “Christina Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Tractarians.” The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, edited by J. Baker, P. Nockles and J. Pereiro, Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 427-440.

Ludlow, E. “Christina Rossetti and the Bible.” The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, edited by R. Lemon, E. Mason, J. Roberts, and C. Rowland, Blackwell, 2010, pp. 551-561.

Encyclopaedia Entries

Ludlow, E., “Greenwell, Dora.” The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by L. Scholl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Ludlow, E., “Historical Fiction.” The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by L. Scholl. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Ludlow, E., and Vernon, A., Adelaide Anne Procter: Victorian Poetry, Faith and Fundraising. 5-part podcast series. 2025.