The protagonist of the novel, which is set primarily in the 1860s, is Robert de Hausée Orange, an idealistic orphan whose various adventures lead him through from Normandy in France to England, English politics, and a late phase of the Carlist wars in Spain, to a place in Parliament as a follower of Benjamin Disraeli . Disraeli is central here. Not only is he a major character (writing Lothair when he is introduced, Disraeli mentors the younger man and correctly predicts Robert's conversion to Roman Catholicism , despite its potential to damage his political prospects), but as Margaret Maison has noted, Robert himself is an idealised portrait of the former Prime Minister, and Hobbes writes in imitation of Disraeli 's style. The novel is also notable for its ardent, and intelligent, discussion of Roman Catholic faith.

Lorna Reynolds and Eavan Boland liken this novel to the work of John Galsworthy , as it is the saga of several generations of an Irish family building a business and growing in wealth. It draws on the story of KOB 's own family, opening in the year 1789, when Anthony Considine sneaks into Mellick in the Vale of Honey (KOB 's fictional version of Limerick) with a stolen horse. (KOB may have re-used elements from her unfinished play The Silver Roan). The Considines prosper. The John Considine who establishes the family in the mid-nineteenth century presents himself as proprietor of a country house, River Hill; he is known (with ironical remembrance of the past) as Honest John. The family serves as a lens through which KOB explores issues of religion (several of its members being particularly fervent in their Catholic faith), love, class, possessiveness, and liberty. Women fare badly in this realistically-depicted world: to love one's husband is dangerous because of the constant childbirths, not to love him is a torment, not having a husband is stagnation.

While working on this book (as once before while working on Charles II ), AF found that a helpful exercise in optical research was to pack herself physically into priest-holes, the surviving, tiny, secret hiding places where illicit Catholic priests (like the fugitive Charles in a later generation) survived for days and where she felt like screaming for release after five minutes. She had to change her American publisher to get this cherished project accepted for the USA. William Boyd made an exciting screenplay from this book but the film was never made: terrorism was just then a topic too hot to touch.

A long novel with a complex plot, Grantley Manor concerns the trials of both Anglican and Catholic heroines, and the human cost of religious prejudice. It opens on the motherless Margaret Leslie growing up an Anglican at the beautiful old Grantley Manor in the years following the Napoleonic wars. As a girl she is filled with idealistic tales of Catholic heroism (in women as well as men) by her father's old friend Walter Sydney. The Catholic element in the story gives GF the opportunity for introducing both Italians and Irish people living in England. In a happy-marriage ending Margaret converts and becomes the wife of Walter; their happiness is marked not only by the birth of a son but also by the construction of a Catholic chapel.

MMS published Emancipation, through Houlston at Wellington: her topic is not slavery, but the Catholic Emancipation Act which received royal assent on 13 April this year.

She began writing for publication after her first marriage, her move to Ireland, and conversion to Evangelical Protestantism. Her first titles, published by the Dublin Tract Society , were pamphlets: proselytizing, anti-Catholic little children's books of sixteen or thirty-two pages. Subsequent titles included The Willow Tree, 1828, The Burying Ground, 1830, The Dying Sheep (which reached a second edition in 1832), The Oak-grove (second edition 1833), and White Lies and Good and Bad Luck (which both reached third editions, 1833). Grumbling, 1834, was a few pages longer than the former titles, and had a second edition after Tonna's death, in 1850, while The Deserter, 1836, was a full-length book. These propaganda publications (which she continued to produce until 1840) are characterized by their simple religious messages and anti-Catholic fervour, as well as their frequent representations of nature and of flowers, as evidences of God's handiwork familiar to children. CET took the pen name of Charlotte Elizabeth some years before she separated from her husband, presumably in order to keep her earnings from him.

Here she writes also about the English Civil War as a way of writing about the First World War. She writes in a similarly veiled manner about her own religious struggles at a time when she was moving towards Anglo-Catholicism. The Roman Catholic Church appears here in an unfavourable light—or so her agent feared, while a Jesuit who was one of its readers correctly perceived the author as a potential Catholic convert.

She says here that it is learned men, not women, who are responsible for misreadings of the Bible. Women were the first to see the risen Christ, and are allowed to read for themselves now the prohibitions of the Roman Catholic Church are a thing of the past.

Here, more directly than in her novels, she deals with political and social issues: double tithing (Catholics having to support the established church which they did not frequent), corrupt middle-men, and absentee landlords. In her preface she allows that it is a very delicate matter for a woman, a young woman, and an Irish woman to write on national themes; but patriotism, she says, is related to family feeling, and so is appropriate for women as politics is not. In an echo of Samuel Johnson 's Rambler 96, she claims her fiction will weave an airy web to draw the brightest tints of her variegated tissue from the deathless coloring of truth. The first sketch describes the history as well as the appearance of the wild, irregular country around Sligo. The decline of a former city into a ruinous and wretched village reminds her of the eventual, inevitable fate of all empires. Cultured ancient Ireland fell before England as ancient Greece and Rome fell to the barbarians; but the British empire too is mortal. Her second volume closes by quoting Thady O'Conolan , who praises, and translates from, the Irish language which its people are now discouraged from speaking.

FT was a strong believer in established religion, and as she had frowned upon English practices antithetical to the Church of England , so too she found American religious pluralism unsettling. In one anecdote, she describes the emotionality of women at a Presbyterian revival, who, despite their elevated social status and fine dress, allowed themselves to be swept up into fevered states: it was a frightful sight to behold innocent young creatures, in the gay morning of existence, thus seized upon, horror struck, and rendered feeble and enervated for ever. One young girl, apparently not more than fourteen, was supported in the arms of another . . . her face was pale as death; . . . her chin and bosom wet with slaver; she had every appearance of idiotism.

View reference

Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans. Editor Larson, John Lauritz, Brandywine Press.

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Inequality between the sexes is, FT argues, responsible for these scenes of religious extremism. She wonders: if the men of America value[d] their women as men ought to value their wives and daughters, would such scenes be permitted among them? She concludes that both Protestant England and Catholic France shew an infinitely superior religious and moral aspect to mortal observation, both as to reverend decency of external observance, and as to the inward fruit of honest dealing between man and man.

HB flaunts the animus of her firm, though female pen against John, Baron Fitzgibbon (later Earl of Clare) , who promoted Irish Union with England and opposed the rights of Catholics.

Her novel fictionalizes the lives of French Catholic missionary priests (John Baptist Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf , who in the novel are Father Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant ) working in the newly-created New Mexico diocese which had been the Spanish colonial possession of Nuevo Mexico until the United States recently and forcibly annexed it. The book concerns its hero's life as much as his death, and is almost less like a novel than a series of anecdotes or vignettes: the unlikely friendship of two young Frenchmen in training for the priesthood; relations between French missionaries, Pueblo Indians, incoming Americans, rich and poor Mexicans, dispossessed Navajos; perilous desert journeys on horseback and muleback; rumoured miracles, like the life-saving hospitality offered in the desert by a family of old man, young woman, and child, who vanish afterwards leaving no trace; the rescue of an Indian woman, a devout Catholic convert, enslaved by white ranchers; Archbishop Latour's discovery of the stone from which he will construct, in French Romanesque style, the cathedral of Santa Fe. In one remarkable passage, this man who is leaving his imprint on his adopted country muses on the different approach of the natives, who express their respect for the landscape by carefully refraining from leaving any trace behind them: who do not seek to improve, and also do not despoil.

Linked Lives features another orphan heroine, the well-born, highly romantic Mabel Forrester. The purpose of the novel is to show Mabel's progress towards embracing the Roman Catholic faith. Mabel, however, virtually shares the position of heroine with Katy Mackay, a Glasgow slum child whom she takes into service. The grimly realistic account of Katy's struggles and deprivation at home includes the death of her sister Maggie.

The royal licence indicates that the gentlewoman attribution must have been accurate. The date belongs to the height of the plot: that is, the anti-Catholic furore that followed the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey and the false allegations of Titus Oates about a Catholic plot to overthrow the government and re-catholicise England. This poem was originally published by Henry Brome ; Maureen E. Mulvihill argues in a forthcoming article that it was printed by King's Printer Thomas Dawks the younger . It was given the lead position in Female Poems . . . by Ephelia in 1679: not, however, in the same form as the earlier broadsheet. A private reprinting of the poem on its own, also 1679 and again as a broadsheet, evidently not by Henry Brome's printing house, made substantive changes to the original broadsheet. Here the title was altered to read A Poem as it was Presented / To His / Sacred Majesty / On the Discovery of the Plott (the word discovery pointing to a later moment in history), and the last line was changed to make the author of the plot one individual (presumably Oates) instead of many conspirators. The title seems also to record an actual presentation, probably of a fine manuscript copy—which, if coming from a Stuart courtier duchess, would be a very different style of presentation to royalty from that used by middle-class writers like Elinor James or Joan Whitrow . Six copies of Ephelia's broadside in its re-issued form survive, in the British Library , Bodleian Library (two copies), the Huntington Library , and at Yale and Harvard Universities . The re-issue is ascribed to a Lady of Quality; its colophon date of 1679 places it after the crisis produced by the plot had begun to ebb.

This must be the book which saddened Mary Russell Mitford and Henry Chorley when they judged that it turns out to be a dead failure. In his obituary of MH , James Britten wrongly identified the novel's setting with Nottingham, and deplored its sympathetic account of the ancient Catholic tradition of reverencing holy wells.

James's strong admonitory style has much in common with that of religious prophets. She is equally ready to cross swords with Quakers and Dissenters on the one hand and Catholics on the other, to venerate Queen Elizabeth , vindicate the reputation of Charles I , or reason with William or with George I . She has a grasp both of detail (commenting on individual magistrates by name) and of the underlying issues. She takes a firm position on every burning topic: on the succession question under Charles II (The Case Between a Father and his Children), the Catholic question under James II and again under Anne (Mrs. James's Vindication of the Church of England and May It Please Your Lordships); the legality of the Revolution under William (This Being Your Majesty's Birth-Day). Her tone is remarkably confident, sometimes aggressive, and in the later stages of her career it reflects a sense of herself as a person of authority and influence. She seldom mentions her gender, though on one occasion she mentions the incident of Balaam's ass, as proving God's readiness to make even a dumb beast speak at need.

HJ published what she called a study of the Irish question:The Priest's Blessing, a novel about rural Irish life (particularly clashes between Catholic tenants and Protestant landlords).

JK 's style is plain, vigorous, and effective. She is consistently attentive to the details of women's lives and to the effects of history, politics, race, and religion in the various cultures she visits. Though she makes many scathing comments, she refuses to discuss the vexed question of alleged white superiority, arguing that differences of nurture (the oppressive Mughal government of India) make it impossible to compare differences of nature. Her analysis of despotic government reflects the influence of Montesquieu 's De l'Esprit des loix, which she quotes here. At Santa Cruz on Tenerife she records the capture of the island by the Spaniards in the fourteenth or fifteenth century from the Guanches, the original inhabitants. The Guanches lived almost in a state of nature, without laws or religion, and unable to give any account of their origin (which may have been Carthaginian); she notes both their bravery in self-defence and their humanity towards the Spanish. She observes the physical appearance of their descendents, the Moors, their position as mostly labourers and servants, and the fact that Tenerifeans of European descent, though they are all called Spaniards, mostly stem from Irish Roman Catholic families who about the end of the last century found it necessary to seek in this island that liberty and protection which their own country, at that period, did not afford them. She classes Tenerife as in short, a poor Roman Catholic country, which are every where pretty much the same. Its ruling class (it must be confessed) . . . have little desire for improvement; indeed, they evince that blind superstition and religious enthusiasm which produced the well-known cruelty of Spain as a colonial power in America. Yet the historical details she supplies somewhat complicate this judgment, and she qualifies it by writing that a better knowledge of the country might reveal unsuspected virtues of honour and respect for parents (especially mothers), and that the common people, although not great workers, are sober and contented. She reveals that she had entertained romantic expectations of nunneries, envisaging tranquil, pious, beautiful young women engaged in fine handiwork. These expectations are disappointed, and she observes instead that matriarchal dominance is hard on young women.

RL sets out to portray Dante and Beatrice's relationship in the context of the social and political conditions that surrounded them, while simultaneously arguing that the Divina Commedia emerged from this real love, this powerful passion. For this reason she needs to render Beatrice as more than a poetical abstraction, and to posit that the earthly woman was the necessary mortal precursor of the fount and type of heavenly knowledge seen in the Divina Commedia. Dante's Beatrice, RL argues, is not two separate women but a single one, the earthly being rendered divine by her death. Her novelistic portrayal of Beatrice consequently draws on Dante 's works, using direct quotations from the Vita Nuova, for instance, to describe her ineffable goodness. Deeply woven in her story is a defence of Protestantism as it was to emerge as a counter to the corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church . The Catholic priesthood (especially the Franciscan Order ) is presented as acquisitive, manipulative, and power-hungry, and particular stress is laid on the excesses of the Inquisition . The saintly death of Beatrice (and, implicitly, her correct religious views) prompt her uncle, a friar who has taken part in the religious and political intrigues of the city, to ask himself: Had it been really worth his while to dwell apart and solitary, to forego the natural ties of human kindred, and some day to die unwept, for the sake of ruling and ruining mankind, in the name of religion? At the same time, the novel takes a tolerant stance which might be called philosemitism, when Beatrice bemoans the taunts and ostracism visited on a Jewish trader, and asks (in a near echo of Shakespeare 's Shylock): is a Jew not fashioned out of mortal flesh and blood as much as we are?

SM 's topic here is sexuality in relation to a life vowed to celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church . Her protagonist, Sister Anna, is a missionary nun in Latin America. She is in her late thirties and became a novice after graduation. She was certain of her vocation from an early age, and has been an active and valued member of her community. She launches on a voyage of agonising self-doubt and self-discovery on the night she hears that a fellow-nun, Sister Kate, has been raped. Anna is seized with a conviction of God's anger, a paralysing awareness of centuries of violence against women, and especially of the physical and sexual crimes committed by men of her own faith coming to a new world with the Church's charge to save souls. Along with all this goes anxiety about her own sexuality and her lesbian feelings. Her Mother Superior gives her leave for a research trip to London to recover from her breakdown. In the world outside the convent unexplored aspects of herself seem reflected back from people she encounters. One is a brain-damaged child who seems to represent humanity at its most unteachable. The other is a fellow-scholar whom she meets in the British Library : Karen, who is a feminist, a socialist, and a lesbian. Friendship with Karen challenges Anna's brain, her sexuality, and her spirituality. She considers breaking with her religion; she experiments violently and unhappily with her sexuality. At last, with the blessing, more or less, of Karen, of her Mother Superior, and of her own father, she returns to South America but not to the convent, to learn to live and work as an adult woman and as a Catholic outside patriarchal structures.

These jaunty poems contrast with a gothic-toned narrative about a party of boar-hunters who are joined by a mysterious White Knight who seems to be on a temporary pass out of Hell. SP speculates on the range of possible futures awaiting a friend's baby son, and in another poem declines, apparently in her own person, an invitation to travel to India. In To a Counterfeit Shilling (which makes no overt allusion to her probable recent novel The Medallion) the poet considers all the ways she might pay away a forged coin discovered in her possession, and the various griefs it would cause (especially if traded to a writer). In the end she resolves to shut it away where it can do no damage. In another poem SP commemorates the delay in Lord Fitzwilliam 's arrival in Ireland as Viceroy (which in fact was caused by his approaches to the Irish opposition; he was more open to the idea of Catholic emancipation than was the government he worked with). The poem insists that Fitzwilliam accepted this position not for gain but from the desire to improve conditions in his native land: Ireland responds with spring-like conditions when he is expected, but relapses to winter when his coming is delayed. (He finally arrived in Ireland in January 1795.)

CS published through Bentley in London a lengthy (three-volume) anti-Catholic novel entitled Beatrice, or, The Unknown Relatives.

KT centres this novel around two families, one Catholic and one Protestant, in a rural Irish town. It involves a love affair between the Catholic son, who is already engaged, and the Protestant daughter—though physical, sexual love is never mentioned, but is suggested through romance convention, as became KT 's unvarying practice.

This traces mystical beliefs and practice from the Bible, through the early days of Christianity, the medieval Catholic mysticism of England and various European countries, to seventeenth-century Protestant beliefs and practices, and finally to modern forms of mysticism.