Catherine Hubback, a niece of Jane Austen, began her publishing career in the mid nineteenth century with her completed version of a novel left unfinished by her famous aunt, of whom she also wrote reminiscences. Her own novels are competent and conventional, vehicles of an explicitly and emphatically Christian message. They are, however, the very reverse of the kind of fiction that Austen advised for her younger relations, with their reliance on arbitrary plot twists (especially threat to life and limb), and the way their religious feeling dwells on death and the future life rather than this one.