In Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” the act of writing takes the place of the romance being written about. It is by way of the writing process that the romantic other replaces God as the object of devotion. Eloisa’s writing would thus seem to function as Derrida argues writing functions in western philosophy in that it articulates one absence and generates another. Yet writing has an alternative function in the poem. Because it becomes a surrogate for romance, it produces the other’s presence and also the theological crisis the poem explores.