The cosmopolitan biography of the English religious liberal, feminist and writer, Sophia Dobson Collet

This chapter explores the cosmopolitan life of the little-known English religious liberal, feminist and writer, Sophia Dobson Collet (1822-1894). It examines Collet’s close connection with members of the Brahmo Samaj, a movement founded in 1820s Calcutta by Rammohun Roy to promote religious and social reform among Hindus. It shows her pivotal role in shaping a ‘cosmopolitan thought zone’ connecting Brahmos with British and American Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Theists and liberal Christians. Collet, if argues, enacted spiritual fellowship and a shared commitment to social reform within a respectful trans-racial and trans-faith affective community. Although she did not articulate an anti-imperial politics, she was committed to bridging the racialized divisions and hierarchies that characterised the ‘imperial social formation’ between Britain and India.