IN 1920, The Vision, the house journal of the Anglo-Catholic organisation the Association for Promoting Retreats (APR), printed the following request on behalf of the society: ‘Give us a Retreat House on the outskirts of every town in England. In two generations we will show you a Church revived in vision and power and a nation with a new outlook upon religion.’ The idea of an Anglicanism diminished in ‘vision and power’ and in need of revival is in conversation with the sociological narrative of secularisation. One version of this story describes how control of several important institutions had been wrested from the churches by secular states. No longer required to interact with religious institutions as a matter of everyday life, many one-time church members drifted from their congregations, drastically reducing documented religious affiliation.

Various accounts have sought to situate modernism within this broader story, working to overcome the often unstated assumption that modernism begins where religion ends. By drawing attention to their sustained engagement with the occult, Leon Surette has questioned what was formerly the received wisdom that modernists, with a few notable exceptions, represented the vanguard of a secular ideology. Pericles Lewis, crystallising a number of arguments about post-Romantic literature and the modernist epiphany, has presented modernism as an endeavour, figuratively speaking, to repurpose otherwise defunct church buildings; in this reading, modernism is not so much an agent of secularisation as at once its beneficiary and critic. It fills the gap left by organised religion, channelling the emotions and pursuing the concerns that were once the preserve of religious traditions. While secularisation followed an inescapable logic, the experience of those who formerly filled the pews was not forgotten. Modernist texts undertook a form of ministry. Centring her discussion on early twentieth-century depictions of angels, Suzanne Hobson, too, sees modernist literature as a feature of a changed religious landscape represented by a ‘complex and variegated pattern of belief and disbelief’; in this story, modernist depictions of the angel are simultaneously shaped by wider shifts in cultural attitudes to religion and agents of the broader process ‘by which orthodox religion slides towards [either] magical […] beliefs […] [or] an everyday or secular register’.