The chronicler acted as scholar, oral historian (using the accounts of eye-witnesses wherever possible), and hagiographer (in the domestic or female tradition). Her story of the nuns' hardships and struggles, their love, humour, and community, is immensely appealing and readable. Her accounts of the former lives of incoming nuns are rich in tales of the heroism of English Catholic mothers keeping their persecuted families emotionally and financially alive.

Brocard Sewell discerned in this novel an accurate sketch, under fictional names, of members of Eric Gill 's circle. The protagonist, Cressy, grows up in the stifling and isolated environment of an arts-and-crafts Catholic community presided over by her patriarchally dominating grandfather and serviced by the women of the family, in the village of Quayle, which is set on a hill and reached by a dead-end road. She escapes at the first opportunity into the outside, real, modern world, by marrying David Little. He too has been dominated but in a very different way: as the last son still at home with his mother, Midge, whose husband has also left her, he has been stifled not by austerity but by plenty and comfort. His mother actively though deviously seeks to put the marriage under pressure. Its discomfort, domestic chaos, and failures in feeling and communication are graphically depicted; so is the glitzy, vapid attraction for Cressy of the modern, non-utopian world of television, fast food, and swaggering teenagers in black leather jackets.

GBS published a somewhat different kind of memoir in All in Good Time, which describes the train of thinking that brought her from the non-practising Judaism of her childhood into the Roman Catholic Church .

The book does not measure up to the force and clarity of the opening. The suggestively-named Deletia Granville is a mysterious, neglected young girl at the outset, pensive and literary, loving sublime nature and her father's books. Living at Granville Abbey, she is oppressed by the despotic, Roman Catholic Lady Valville, and compelled to attend Catholic services although her father was a Protestant. She sees nobody except her tyrant's maid (Mrs Abbot) and the priest's niece, Victoire Maublanc. She faces the prospect of forcible marriage to Lord Valville, Lady Valville's son by her first marriage. Lady Valville meanwhile is affected with partial fits of insanity, given to wandering about at dusk, and raving about torture and spectres. The first volume concludes with Deletia dangerously ill after an abortive escape attempt.

As a member of her community Shirley wrote for the good of that community. Though she professed to judge herself unworthy, she thought it her duty & part to write, hoping to inspire all those that shall hereafter posses her place & offis of government, that they may sett her as a true pattron & example before them. Exposition is as important as narrative in this life, which begins (after the author's address to her readers) with its subject's birth, but ends not on her death but on lengthy accounts of her devotional practices and on the celebrations for her jubilee (marking fifty years since her profession as a nun). As her subject's friend and daughter in religion, ES shows insight into Clement's mind and feelings: the feelings of the child and the young nun as well as those of the revered old woman whom she herself had known. She looks back at the generations of Clement's family as if at her own spiritual genealogy. Sir Thomas More 's household was famous for educating its girls and boys together and in the same way: Catholic heroism seemed to be entailed from the father to his daughters. The eldest of these children was Margaret More (later Margaret Roper ); about three years younger was her relation and honorary sister Margaret Giggs , who became by marriage Margaret Clement and whose eleventh and youngest child was the Margaret Clement of St Ursula's . Margaret Giggs had visited Sir Thomas in the Tower, been present at his execution, gone on to visit other Catholic political prisoners in Newgate Prison (keeping them alive at risk of her own life), and had fled from England to Flanders with her family at the accession of Edward VI on 28 January 1547. ES gives considerable space to her subject's mother, allowing due weight both to her visionary and to her practical or militant life.

MAS describes several very early writing projects. When her mother gave her a writing-case which locked, to ensure privacy, she spent hours in pouring out the effusions of my own bitter heart, as well as in writing accounts of what had most interested her in her reading. She composed biographies of Sir Anthony Babington (historical defender of Mary Queen of Scots and a Catholic martyr) and of someone she calls John Polly, a traitor to Queen Elizabeth . She wrote these on old paper, imitating the old English character, protectively wrapped and boxed them, buried them with suitable accompanying objects (Elizabethan coins and skulls), and planted oak saplings above the spot. She hoped her works would be found three hundred years later—and presumably that they would then be dated as five hundred years old.

JS portrays Portugal too as an unhappy land, full of oppressive regulations and of officers exacting fines and fees from travellers. Upper-class women are virtual prisoners in their homes; marriage without consent is savagely punished, and everywhere is seen the heavy hand of the rich, self-serving, censorious Catholic church , whose manner of worship, she pronounces, is no better than a puppet show.Oh Britons, Britons, little do you know your own happiness! Once she reaches Lisbon a good deal of her closing letter is taken up with conventional sight-seeing and comments on the British colony in the city.

The first of these volumes aims to restore Dante to the general reader and the seeker after religious truth. DLS emphasises his theological content, and offers a simple, incisive account of the Catholic doctrines of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, as well as two especially interesting chapters on his imagery. The second volume (designed to aid the beginner in Dante studies, but also to complement the first) concentrates on Dante's literary-poetic appeal. DLS explores his use of Virgil, compares his work with that of Milton.

Anti-Catholic sentiments are related through the vehicle of a romance in which a young Italian-French heroine is persuaded by a suitor to give up her loyalty to a useless priest.

In the body of the novel ER pays little attention to her supposed source. She creates no fictitious narrator, and the style in which she relates the well-known story of Joan, or Jeanne (her peasant youth, her visions, her military triumphs in leading the French against the English, and her trial and execution by the Roman Catholic Church for heresy), is entirely novelistic and entirely of its own age. She begins with a brief survey of the historical background; then minutely describes the market-day bustle in the town of Vaucouleurs, where our chronicle commences; then picks up two people walking home from the market, a middle-aged man, apparently belonging to the lower order of burgesses, and a young peasant girl who would merit a second glance only to a person of particular intelligence or curiosity: Jeanne, who is then minutely described in her turn. Sometimes indeed (as in [t]he reader will scarcely have failed to remark with surprise)ER seems to forget her alleged source altogether.

Here MR recounts her experiences as a budding writer and a member of the women's movement in London. She writes of her Catholic upbringing, of living in communes and building and surviving relationships. Her narrative, she says, in one sense goes in a straight line, chronologically, charting my rake's progress, but in another sense is a flâneur, circling, looping, and dreaming.

MR 's account of her first voyage (based on journals kept at the time) enthusiastically describes tropical birds, flying fish, marine phosphorescence, and waterspouts; the markets, salt pans, and mountains of St Kitts. She reports with approval the activity and productivity of St Kitts, and with distaste the Roman Catholic beliefs and practices of Madeira. According to Melissa Bailes, Riddell follows British systems (those of John Ray and Thomas Pennant ) of classifying animals and plants, rather than that of Linnaeus . She makes no overt comment in print on the institution of slavery, though her letters show her to have been an abolitionist.

Her first piece of this kind, for Friendship's Offering, 1826, was titled A Tale of Ispahan and designed to supplement an engraving of that town from a sketch by her brother Sir Robert Ker Porter . Though she was a lifelong Protestant Anglican, JP 's personal acquaintance with at least one prominent Roman Catholic family led her to express sympathy in print with members of that religion, writing about the poverty of French priests living in exile in London or about the buildingand consecration of a new Catholic church.

EP quotes La Rochefoucauld to the effect that true love is that emotion lurking at the bottom of the heart, whose name we do not know. The story is set in France, and features the Count and Countess of Clairvalle, who married for duty, though each was in love with another, grew to hate each other violently, and at last, by way of jealousy, learn to love. When the countess sees her former love, she realises that her feeling for him is extinct. Her husband's encounter with his discarded mistress, on the other hand, produces an outbreak of melodramatic violence (by her against him) at the story's close. She had a revolutionary education, and dresses as a man for her attempt to stab him. This is a novel of ideas, in which English-French and Protestant-Catholic issues are debated. The hero has an intellectual, unmarried sister. An aversion to learned ladies is called the common cant of ignorant men, who feel lessened by a comparison which always renders their own shallowness apparent. Yet the characters of some learned ladies are criticised. The novel's sentiments are liberal but not revolutionary. An English character writes, I am glad we are at peace with the new world; for though so much has been said about America proving an ungrateful child, it seemed always to be forgotten that there could be such a thing as a tyrannical parent. But the school of revolution is implicated in the violence of the woman who tries to kill her ex-lover, and America is felt to be sadly lacking in poetic associations, though Anna Letitia Barbauld (in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven) is mentioned as having tried to provide some for it.

The main character, Maja Carmen Carrera, a black Jazz singer, immigrated from Cuba to London when she was five years old. Pregnant and living with her (white) Ghanaian husband (Aaron, a doctor), Maja struggles to locate herself in her complicated family past (Cuban and British, English- and Spanish-speaking, Santería and Catholic ). Meanwhile the Yoruba goddess Yemaya lives in the somewherehouse, which has one door leading to London and one to Lagos. Yemaya laments the fact that Yoruba gods must disguise themselves as Catholic saints. As such, her migration is just as complex as Maja's. Like The Icarus Girl, this narrative has female friendship at its centre. But this novel is more complex in terms of form, style, and plot.

In 1867 DG 's biography of the Roman Catholic preacher Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire was published.

The collection reflects AG 's political ambivalence at this time: she represented the Ascendancy politician sympathetically as a member of her husband's family, and yet supported the rights of Irish Catholic tenants.

The Halls describe every Irish county for their readers, advising English tourists on what they might wish to see. They detail Irish landmarks—botanical gardens, jails, factories, the recently established Roman Catholic College at Maynooth, and Maria Edgeworth 's home. They also summarize each county's history, politics, geography, and culture. The work is a blend of fact and fiction. Mixed with historical accounts, statistics and essays are legends and stories most probably penned by AMH .

She wrote on the important local stocking industry in A Letter of Remonstrance from an Impartial Public to the Hosiers of Leicester, 1825, which supports the workers in a strike. She addressed the topic of elections in two publications of 1826, following the defeat of a Radical candidate by the locally powerful Tories using very questionable means—Appeal to the Electors of the United Kingdom on the Choice of a New Parliament and Animadversions on the late Contested Election for the Borough of Leicester. Her A Letter of Remonstrance, which takes the side of the strikers (as heroic free-born Britons) against the employers, put her in the opposite party from her brother John , who was an unbending member of the latter group.EH 's Animadversions supports the cause of Catholic Emancipation; her Appeal to the Electors calls on voters to select representatives with a record of support for humanitarian causes.

EH published Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature, with illustrations.

EH 's short introductory poem, The Widows Suite, seeking approval from a friend named T. S., exemplifies her somewhat tortured inversions of natural word-order: Moreover I not willing am / that Truth at all be Blam'd. The Society of Friends , she says, is the true Body of Christ. Bearing in mind the conventional depiction of the Roman Catholic Church as the degraded, over-ornamented Whore of Babylon, she presents the Quakers also as a female body. She also uses the image of God's children as babies at the breast: this is not unusual, having been current since at least the days of Julian of Norwich , but EH is almost alone in envisioning (and, by implication, positing as a feature in God's love for his flock) the mother's pleasure, as well as the baby's, in their intimate connection. And when the Child has suckt its fill, the Breast likewise is eas'd, / The Child then it is satisfi'd, and Mother also pleas'd.

He intended his poem as a pindaric ode on a modern Catholic martyrdom. It describes the raging force of the sea, the courage of the dominant nun who heartens her companions to die well, and the struggles of the poet to accept such disaster as God's providence. This poem employs the sprung rhythm, with stress-symbols inserted above the words to guide the reader through the outraging of conventional stress-patterns, which was to be the characteristic of Hopkins's mature poetry.

The poems in this collection include Kismet, Lovers at the Lake Side, and Nature, for Nature's Sake. Several of the poems explore more dark and serious matters. The Maid-Martyr, for example, narrates the persecution of a woman by the Roman Catholic Church . The woman's lover is forced to watch her execution by burning: O! it was soon,
Soon over, and I knew not any more,
Till grovelling on the ground, beating my head,
I heard myself and scarcely knew 't was I,
At Holy Church railing with fierce mad words,
Crying and craving for a stake, for me.

View reference

Ingelow, Jean. Poems. Longmans, Green, 1885.

182

View scholar note

This may possibly reflect the influence of Anne Manning 's novel The Lincolnshire Tragedy, 1866. In the novel Anne Askew 's burning is watched and reported with horror by a male narrator, though he is not her lover and she has been married.

Here she does not spare her vituperation against the new king's Catholic advisors, and is equally outspoken in her own resolve to sacrifice one hundred lives in the king's service if she had them.