GA 's writings treat in detail the Jewish faith to which she strongly adhered, and she often focuses on the persecution and prejudice which Jews suffered throughout the nineteenth century, as well as historically. As critic Michael Galchinsky argues, the practices and culture of crypto-Judaism, whereby Jews evaded the Inquisition by passing for Catholic while retaining their ancestral faith in private, considerably influenced both the form and content of her work. Despite her intense commitment to improving the standing of her people through her writing, her friend Anna Maria Hall avers that she and her husband could only with difficulty get GA to speak on religious topics and were quite unacquainted with her religious habits. However, her continuing dedication to Judaism, and her identification of herself with her Sephardic Jewish heritage—which she also considered a nationality—was obvious to those who knew her, and she may have been a proto-Zionist: the natural and unaffected eloquence of her words, when referring to the past history of the Jews . . . and the positive radiance of her countenance when she spoke of the gathering of the tribes at Jerusalem, could never be forgotten . . . .

A century later, the writer Kate O'Brien told a probably apocryphal story about the Alexander family's ecumenism. The Viceroy of Ireland, she says, wanted to have a strictly private and apparently casual word in confidence both with the Primate of Ireland and with his neighbour the Roman Catholic Cardinal Logue . Under the pretence of a duck-shooting trip, the Viceroy dropped in for lunch with Alexander, had his first talk, and left, he said, to catch a train to Dublin. In fact he dropped in for tea with the Cardinal—where he found the elder Miss Alexander ensconced behind the teapot as hostess, a position she often filled for the Cardinal.

It seems AA was arrested twice this year, for speaking against the Sacrament. The second time was on 13 June. She was questioned by Edmund Bonner , Bishop of London, but later acquitted for lack of witnesses. It seems that at this date he was concerned more about the heterodoxy of Askew's beliefs than with her connections and contacts, whom he had not yet guessed to be important. Her divorce was denied about the same time. She may have signed a Catholic credo (though evidence is conflicting). She was nevertheless pulled in for questioning again almost at once, but released, and went north (to her brother, not her husband).

BB was born into the English lower middle class. She says her family had been quite well off until the slump of 1929, but then they had lost everything. She converted to Catholicism during her late teenage years. She was received into the Church while acting in Scotland, which was convenient because in England she would legally have needed her parents' consent, being under age. She received her religious instruction from a nun. Later she became a lapsed Catholic.

She was a Christian believer of sentimental cast, who liked to see spiritual significance in details of her life. Brought up as an Anglican , she learned from a French Catholic servant to cherish and pray to a shrine to the Virgin. She was, however, enthusiastic about the Welsh-speaking services of a Dissenting chapel in Wales from the first time that she attended it. She not only prayed at moments of personal crisis but believed in God's active, frequent intervention in her life. When widowed for the second time, she turned increasingly to . . . spiritualism (without relinquishing her Christianity) and actually practised as a faith-healer through her custodianship of what she called the Miracle Stone, which spent each night in the shrine to the Virgin in her bedroom.

MB was a Roman Catholic and a humanist, like the rest of her English, professional-class, and unusually scholarly family.

This family spanned a number of the influences she would later reject: her mother was a fervent Catholic and her father a conservative in politics and in cultural choices, whereas as a young woman she became an atheist and a socialist. Her mother took her to church as soon as she could walk, and explained the benevolent care for her of saints and of her own guardian angel. My heaven was constellated with a myriad benevolent eyes. During World War One, Simone, who had been a passionate small child given to tantrums, embarked on a career of being good. She was introduced to the sweet delights of confession, and behaved to such effect that her confessor congratulated her mother upon the radiant beauty of [her] soul. Approaching her first communion, and encouraged by her mother though not by the nursemaid, she invented every kind of mortification, sacrifice and edifying behaviour. Her fervent piety continued until, when she was in her teens, her confessor gave her a little lecture about social bad behaviour of hers, which had come to his ears by gossip. This seemed to her debased and unspiritual; but for the moment she contented herself with finding a different confessor. Not long afterwards she realised that she no longer believed in God. Always an extremist, she went straight from total belief to total unbelief, though this left with her a terror of death and the realization of being alone.

She was brought up in the Anglican church, but very definitely as one of the Anglo-Catholic minority. After her brother's death she turned against religion.

She was brought up a Catholic but became a sceptic, apart from a continuing superstitious feeling about religion.

MEB 's mother, the daughter of a Catholic father and Protestant mother, was from county Cavan in Ireland. She brought up her daughter as a Protestant Anglican , but Mary Elizabeth was later tolerant of her step-children's Catholicism. She said as to religion . . . I cling to the simplest faith, and she was a regular church attender. Her sympathies seem to have been against evangelicalism. Her fiction often casts as villains those who disbelieve in Christ, and several of her novels mock current trends in religion.

Lady Elizabeth Cavendish's birth family was not remarkable for its piety, but she may have been an exception among them. As an unmarried girl she wrote her name in a copy of St Peter's Complaint, the longest poem by the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic poet Robert Southwell . As a grown woman and an Anglican she lived an intense devotional life, as her writings show. Each year from 1660 to 1662 she applied for a dispensation from the religious duty of refraining from meat in Lent.

On the publication of her first book, the Critical Review implied that some of her opinions sounded like those of a Catholic . Defending herself, MB claimed to be irreproachably orthodox, that is Anglican , in her religion.

FB was serious about her Anglican faith, but much more sympathetic towards Roman Catholicism , which was practised by her maternal grandmother, than most Anglicans of her day, even before she married a Catholic.

She has sometimes been said to be a Catholic (perhaps because her husband's family had long had leanings that way); but she was an Anglican who explained in her Philosophical Letters that she followed the Athanasian Creed in her faith in a Trinity which is Incomprehensible both in its individual members and in its totality.

She was born into a supportive, professional English family. Travel in France and exposure to the Oxford Movement made EC consider converting to the Roman Catholic Church later in life. However, she remained an Anglican , a decision influenced by a Swiss Protestant pastor. EC always had a wide tolerance of other faiths.

AC was a devout Christian believer. One group of her editors think she was possibly Roman Catholic , certainly anti-Calvinist; another group thinks she was Calvinist in sympathy.

CFC 's formidable Anglican faith came equally from both parents. Her religious convictions occupied a central place in her life. Though she was strongly anti-Catholic, she eventually turned away from her mother's Evangelicalism and became more High Church. This did not, however, harm their relationship.

At twenty-one, having come of age, Edmée de la Pasture (later EMD ) entered a Catholic convent, the mother house of an enclosed order in Belgium.

Brought up a Catholic , CAD early became an agnostic. She has said that she retain[s] some of the motifs of all that and none of the feelings; faith, guilt, whatever. I do envy people who have a religious faith—I can recall the comfort, the sense of a safety net. The cadences of the mass were important to her, and she says she still has a sense of poems as prayer.

Despite her mother's Unitarian influence, LDG never entirely conformed to any denomination in her religious beliefs. Even at the age of fourteen she maintained her own views: my religion was that of the birds and flowers, gratitude . . . that there was some being that gave existence and happiness for both of which I was very grateful. . . . I believed that there were two principles, good and evil, both equally powerful and constantly striving against each other . . . I got an intense love for Jesus Christ whom I considered as the best man ever born and a great philosopher.

View reference

Frank, Katherine. Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Hamish Hamilton.

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She later reported that it was difficult for her, at first, to choose between denominations: If it were necessary for me to choose a particular sect I should hesitate between the Catholics and the Unitarians for I am loth to part with our Lady, it is so delightful to pray to a woman. Finally, influenced by family friends and her teacher Miss Shepherd, she converted to Anglicanism .

DDM had faith in a kind of spiritual life which included the conviction that there was life after death, but did not subscribe to any formal religion, even though she kept a Catholic missal by her bed and read it regularly.

Brought up both by her teachers and by Katherine Parr in evangelical Protestantism, she developed into a pragmatic Anglican , probably both by conviction and by informed political choice. She exercised her diplomatic skills to avoid being pinned down on divisive details of theology. Though her conformity to Catholicism during her sister's reign was necessary for her survival, her personal faith (even after this danger was over) included elements later thought of as Catholic , like devotion to the symbolic imagery of the cross, as well as the use of colourful oaths. But at some point during her reign she exchanged the cross on the altar in her private Chapel Royal for the Bible.

She is an English feminist who has allowed little information about her family origins to be known. In a lecture given in Spain she said she came from a middle-class background, and in a lecture for the National Secular Society she said that we were Church ofEngland—though they did not go to church on Sunday but spent the time in the compulsory family hobby of sailing. Sent to a RomanCatholic school (though not subjected there to pressure to convert), she was convinced by the age of fourteen that the Catholic faith was the true one: the only question was whether she had the courage to face the family teasing that converting would bring down on her head. As a compromise, she settled for beginning to follow the family religion seriously, receiving confirmation in the Anglican Church and becoming a regular attender at early morning Sunday sung Eucharist. Later, joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament brought her into contact with an articulate young male agnostic, and by the time she reached university she was an agnostic herself. Actual opposition to institutional religion came later, after she became a feminist and learned about the woman-hatred that is embedded in many of the world's major religions.

Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland , arranged the abduction her two youngest sons, Henry and Patrick , at their own wish, from Great Tew to travel to Europe and be educated as Catholics .