The focus of these volumes is explicitly the spiritual or religious aspect of life. FB was fascinated and repelled by the charisma and authoritarianism of the Catholic Church , attracted by the Swiss Free Church , then repelled again by the distance at which the Greek Orthodox clergy kept their congregants. She fills her account of the Holy Land with passages from the Bible. She recounts visits to classical Greek sites which had once inspired her, like Delphi and Sparta, but which she now found cold and lifeless. On the other hand, she presents Hagia Sophia in Istanbul as the image of a new religious feeling: the awe and majesty of Christian cathedrals without their accumulation of petty ornament, conveying the corrective message of Islam  that there is no god but one. She closed this series of volumes with an appeal to all nations of the world to contribute their part towards the huge family of mankind, as if she envisaged something like a post-Christian era that would build a unity of different faiths.

The title story opens in the early eighteenth century, with missionaries lately sent to Poland by the London Society for the Conversion of the Jews . An epidemic in Lissau or Lissa in Posnania sends Rabbi Samuel ben David and his family out of town to live in the woods. His recently widowed daughter, Clara, gives birth and dies, naming her infant daughter Gertrude—events which produce a disquisition on the inefficacy of Judaic prayer. Clara's sister-in-law Isola also dies, leaving an orphan son, Raphael. She stays at home to learn [f]emale observances, apportioned to them by traditional law, (that intolerable yoke!), while he is sent away for education. In due course the pair marry, and later Raphael is converted to Christianity. His baptism (as a Roman Catholic) does not bring him good fortune: his new-born son dies in a fire, and in the end he is murdered by Jewish zealots. His widow, later again, dies raving.

This markedly anti-Catholic story (which goes out of its way to criticise the Jesuits ) begins in the twelfth century, when the abbey was founded. The narrator describes how a mother who had been critical of the Catholic Church resigns herself to its teachings after the deaths of many of her children: her proud heart, which would not bend, had been broken: She passed from careless gaiety to gloomy superstition, and gave up a naturally strong understanding to the control, and submitted her judgement, faith, reason and practice . . . she gave up her surviving child to be educated and guided by her priest.

During her first marriage and her theological debates with her mother-in-law ,EB wrote a dialogue between a Protestant and a Catholic about their respective faiths.

Here CB focuses on the practical, emotional, and intellectual effects of her parents' bifurcated life: her Catholic mother and agnostic father. Also in this essay she returns, perhaps more assertively and profoundly, to her thoughts about Heaney 's representations of women, which had developed through her experience of pilgrimage in Out of Step. She now writes, seemingly without her former ambivalence, I have finally lost patience with Heaney's accounts of the feminine, whether in terms of the land, or the spirit; even—especially—in terms of the real women and men who walk on, or away, in his poem Station Island. She ends with her determination to research her maternal grandmother's history, partly in defiance of the nationalism, Catholicism and the gender distortions they fostered in the North of Ireland, which she finds sickening, not sweet.

In Holland she reports in detail on horses and carriages, agriculture, the styles of dress and houses, customs like those for Sundays (solemn church attendance, followed by feasting, drinking and dancing). The bitterness with which she writes against the Roman Catholic Church caused her editor to omit the offending passages, with an apology for what her late nineteenth-century readers would condemn as bad taste. At Antwerp, visiting a nunnery where she had distant connections, she wrote no surviving comment about the nuns worse than that they must be stifling in their veils on a hot day. Watching a procession through the streets of a silver effigy of the Virgin Mary, she wrote: She cogled terribly, and I thought every minute she would fall; and if she had, somebody would have got a broken crown, for she was very massy, and almost as tall as Bess. On the reasons for this festival procession she observed: I suppose the Virgin is guilty of borrowing money, and she is furthcomeing for a good deall, as her guardians will get severall tuns of good wine upon her credit. She nevertheless judges education to be better in Roman Catholic countries than she had supposed, and better than in Britain. Girls (to whom, however, she devotes much less space than to boys) are boarded at convents until they are ready to be married at sixteen or seventeen, and they are taught every thing that can be thought of.

The book had the honour of being reviewed for the Athenæum by Sydney Morgan . Morgan, anonymous like all Athenæum reviewers, seems at first to be distancing herself from the author in terms of gender, but in reality the distance is effected in terms of rank: writing as a professional, Morgan treats Chatterton as a lady amateur. She did, however, seize the opportunity Chatterton offered her to mock the feebleness of English male travellers in Ireland, and their piteous outcry about lawlessness and danger. She pointed out that women have showed far greater courage, both in exploring and in truthful reporting. Chatterton, Morgan noted, was capable of relating to and respecting people who were poor, even ragged. Morgan favourably regarded these these very delicate volumes, although seeing them as essentially a lady's book, concerned with feelings and immediate responses, not with principles or the causes of the effects observed. But despite the need to make what she called reasonable allowance for a lady's tendencies to overcolouring, Morgan regarded Chatterton as providing a solid basis for her own insistence that the Irish are morally superior to the English and that the Catholic clergy deserve some credit for this state of affairs.Chatterton's work was a great success, as evidenced by the way its first edition sold out within a matter of weeks.

The letters in Christian Sects (which is headed by three quotations, one of them from St John's Gospel) are said to have been exchanged between one of the editors of the Small Books, and a lady of his acquaintance. Their focus is not only on the differences between contemporary sects, but on ways of promoting peaceful coexistence between them. The book argues from an Anglican perspective for tolerance of two groups of nonconformists: Arminians (who include Quakers , Unitarians , Wesleyan Methodists , and others) and Calvinists (who include Presbyterians , Particular Baptists , Evangelicals , and others). The tenets and practices of all these are carefully explained. (Only slight mention is made of the relative prominence of women among Quakers.) The Roman Catholic faith, and the principles of Pusey , which can scarcely be called sects, but which the writer has difficulty in reconciling with reason and separating from superstition, are left for a final chapter. An appendix quotes at length from Christianae Religionis Brevissima Institutio by Faustus Socinus , a Latin text of 1618.

The figure of John Halifax dominates the entire book, and DMC attempts to represent him both as a model entrepreneur (and thus an individualist) and as a perfect Christian. Although DMC means John Halifax to mediate between the rich and the poor—one scene has him defending Luddites against hanging—his allegiance to the middle classes is evident in the strike scene in which he rejects the expressions of solidarity made by the starving workers. He is represented throughout as a progressive who supports Catholic Emancipation, the abolition of slavery, and parliamentary reform. Because these past events were no longer so controversial when the novel was published, John Halifax's successful attainment of gentlemanly status does little to challenge the status quo, and, critic Patrick Brantlinger argues, leaves the larger social problems unresolved.

She suggests in the foreword that her aim was not to criticize the church but simply to hold up a mirror to the psychological and religious environment of English Catholic family life—yet the story implies that such an environment is stifling and psychologically destructive.

In this historically-based essay CD sets out to deal not with individual women but with the great woman-principle. She begins with the worship of the female principle in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, in India of the present day, and through Catholic worship and female saints who were also public intellectuals. She moves on to considering what is wrong in present-day Britain, and to what the emancipated woman of the future might look like, ending with a quotation from Shelley 's Prometheus Unbound.

In his preface, Father Galton remarks on MAD 's specific connection to her grandfather Charles Dickens and their shared sensibilities: The author is the happy owner of one of the great names in our literature, and not only of the name but of the blood of that famous and most prolific of writers; and though the subject-matter is far different and far higher than those on which he wielded his mighty pen, one can find some traces of inherited genius and not a little of inherited feeling in these pages.

View reference

Galton, Father Charles S. J., and Mary Angela Dickens. “Preface”. Sanctuary, R & T Washbourne, Ltd. , 1916, p. vii - ix.

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MAD begins her book with a note identifying the protective function of churches for all accused and/or guilty people who seek sanctuary in them. Reflecting on the importance of the Catholic faith in modern culture, she discusses the varied ways one can seek to understand the Spirit of God and pursue sanctuary from the trials of modern life. She is critical of other religions, including Christian Science , and of the notion that women's independence can or should come via access to higher education and other means.

Critic Elaine V. Beilin discerns the influence on AD 's text of John Foxe 's Actes and Monuments, 1563. Her comment on the martyrdom of de Bourg is particularly explicit in its critique of the Roman Catholic Church and defence of the new Protestantism. She also employs the dramatic imagery and staging proper to poetry. Satan takes a lead role in French reaction against the new reformed religion emanating from Germany. AD particularly mentions the heroism of godly women of great families imprisoned for their beliefs, and the trumped-up stories, which Satan spreads to discredit them, of their fornicating, feasting, and killing babies. The final stanzas address the theme of truth and celebrate Queen Elizabeth as Protestant champion.

COCE opens by making two points which might seem at variance with each other: the fascination which the past holds for later generations, and their ignorance of its discomforts and inconvenience. In a note she thanks Mrs Morgan John O'Connell for supplying interesting details and allowing the use of unpublished manuscripts. An important source for this article was the account of Ireland by Mary Pendarves (later Delany) . O'Conor Eccles also cites Sydney Morgan , and the spirit and toughness shown by her own great-grandmother, Jane O'Conor of Clonalis, in making the journey home from her Paris convent with a concealed priest. (She does not mention that Jane took advantage of being on the road to elope with the Protestant whom she then married).COCE describes the splendour of eighteenth-century Dublin (not typical of Irish urban development) and the lives of the rural, Catholic gentry at a time when, she says, a kindly spirit exist[ed] between classes, and servants, who had no expenses, often got rich on very small wages. These gentry families sent their children abroad for education, spoke Irish with their servants, still felt close to their ancient lineage, and gave huge herds of cattle as dowry when a daughter was married. It is hard, she writes, to credit the link between prosaic, modern Daniel O'Connell and his wild aunt Dark Eileen, who wrote a caoine or keen on her husband's death and vowed personal vengeance on his killers.

This fine novel shows many of the familiar features of Edgeworth's longer fiction. She took the basic plot-line from a poem by George Crabbe , The Confidant. She makes of it a highly intertextual story, in which attitudes and atmospheres are implied by reference to a wide range of literary texts, both fictional and non-fictional. The heroine, Helen Stanley, is in the familiar situation of needing to watch her expenditure, while harboured and loved by a wealthy family who do not really understand her predicament. At first she is to some extent a stabilising influence on her friend, the young wife in the household, Lady Cecilia Clarendon, who runs up debts and angers her husband by riding her horse over-energetically when she is pregnant. (Since the pregnancy is only, delicately, hinted at, modern readers may find themselves astray here in judging the husband's behaviour.) Helen's mistake is to agree to pretend that she was the author of youthful love-letters actually written before her marriage by Lady Cecilia (who has unwisely assured her husband that he was her first love). Cecilia's lying is partly due to the awe in which she holds her mother, a clever and unapproachable woman. Helen's reputation is besmirched and her engagement threatened as the scandal about her escalates; she realises that her falsehood has done harm, not good, to Cecilia, and at last gathers her courage and reveals the wounding but ultimately healing truth. ME uses a good deal of actual experience in her depiction of elite English Whig circles. She also shows her capacity to adapt to changing times: for instance, she makes use of the fact that political involvement was by now more accepted for women, and of the opportunity to support Catholic Emancipation.

PF published her second biographical study, The Knox Brothers, about her father, E. V. Knox , and his brothers, the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox , Anglican theologian Wilfred Knox , and classicist Dillwyn Knox .

Henry Moore included in his life of MBF two letters she wrote to Samuel Walter (one before and one after he came as curate to Madeley) and two which she wrote to an unnamed Roman Catholic priest.

She presents her subject as one of the nation's great institutions and as her own spiritual home. She relates its history from the beginnings, in the entwined careers of Thomas Cranmer , Mary Tudor , and Elizabeth I . She writes frankly about the present condition of the church (falling attendance, falling membership, loss of public interest or even awareness) and about its shortcomings: racial prejudice, class prejudice, gender prejudice, and more especially prejudice about sexuality. Sometimes it seems as if the Church is almost the only body left which cannot deal with homosexuality. According to an obituary of MF , this book contained a number of strange inaccuracies, but, between the lines, it also reflected a deep yearning for the prose of Cranmer and the old Anglo-Catholic liturgy. She treated the record of George Carey , Archbishop of Canterbury, with particularly sympathetic and pertinent insights.

She followed this with nearly fifty novels of domestic, religious, and improving fiction. Although many of her works have romance elements, her style in general was regarded as wholesome. She is generally sympathetic to women, dealing often with the topic of marriage and declining to flatten out quirks of character even while insisting on a correct religious faith. Some of her novels, like St. Beetha's; or, The Heiress of Arne, 1866, are written for young people. In matters of faith EJW advanced an anti-Catholic and anti-ritualist position. She criticised the existing state of the Church of England , depicted Jesuits as sinister conspirators, and provided a number of Catholic central characters who eventually convert to Protestantism. Examples of these last are provided in Father Fabian, The Monk of Malham Tower, 1879.

This luridly anti-Catholic short story attacks priests as desecrators of marriage. It also challenges the institution of the confession, demanding: [h]ow is it possible that, in the enlightened nineteenth century, such monstrosities should exist?

In this text, Warner traces the ways that the figure of the Virgin Mary has been used and changed over time in many cultures and for many reasons. She is critical of the Catholic Church , arguing that it has used Mary as a tool to control women and to ensure that they have little power in the church and society at large. Particularly, Warner notes that while Mary may be an archetypal symbol of divine empowerment, she is both a virgin and a mother, a feat which no other earthly woman can possibly duplicate. The myth of Mary, according to Warner, is no longer relevant in the modern world.

It is set in the late nineteenth-century on the boundary between Westmorland and Lancashire, an exquisite country whose landscape has a profound effect in the narrative. Alan Helbeck, of an old Catholic family, is thrust together with his step-niece Laura Fountain following the death of her infidel father, a Cambridge free-thinker. Laura's sojourn at his ancient home with her step-mother is considered temporary—I must take up a profession, she tells him—but the two disparate personalities are drawn to each other. The ascetic Helbeck, who has remained single and devoted his life and his wealth to the Catholic Church , is torn between it and Laura's wild pagan self that I love—that I desire— while she fights the sense that she is inexorably exiled from him by his religious beliefs; although she finds them repulsive, she finds no weapon against them in rationalism. The conflict of instincts, of the deepest tendencies of two natures is portrayed in painful but compelling detail. The struggle is an eroticized mingling of religion and sexual difference. After an attempt to shoehorn herself into Helbeck's faith, Laura drowns herself in despair, making it appear an accident. MAW wrote later that the character of Laura was, in her inbred, and finally indomitable resistance to Catholicism, based on her own mother , though Laura is a modern sceptic rather than, like Julia Arnold, a passionate Protestant. Laura's character also seems indebted to that of Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy 's recent Jude the Obscure, and her eventual suicide is reminiscent of Ophelia's in William ShakespeareHamlet. But despite the emphasis on landscape, the book is insistently modern: in an uncharacteristically shocking scene, Laura witnesses with horror a worker fall into the furnace in a steel foundry.

PW 's preface notes that adult travel books run to passages of an immoral tendency. Her Seymour family explore Europe: they see a mountain storm in Switzerland and an earthquake in Sicily. The children (one of each sex) produce maps and journals; the adventures tend to happen to the boy. The parents warn their children against prejudice in favour of the familiar, but encourage them to disapprove of Catholic superstition and cruelty. The existence of fairies is denied. Women's riding astride (in Holland) is defended as an acceptable custom because it is safer and more practical than riding side-saddle.

Euphame, while naturally large-minded as well as large-hearted, is a sombre and not always sympathetic character, making a number of anti-Catholic statements, and described by the narrator as judgmental, grave and a little cold-mannered. She is more sympathetic by the novel's end, her trials having taught her a less rigid notion of religion and charity.