An imaginary qualifying examination reading list for nineteenth-century British religious fiction, part one
You have a desperate urge to study nineteenth-century British religious fiction, no doubt because you have been reading my blog for a decade and find it all Extremely Exciting. It's time to take your qualifying examinations, and you've been asked to design a reading list. What do you read?
This is draft #1 of part #1 of my imaginary list, covering fiction written between 1800 and 1837. (Imaginary in the sense of it not being anyone's actual list, anyway.) More books will be added as I go on (see "draft #1," above). Items are limited to books that one could plausibly expect the imaginary graduate student to read without trekking long distances and/or to entirely different countries. (There are some children's books that I haven't been able to read yet, for example, because...anyone want to fund yet another trip to the UK?)
E. C. Agnew, Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience (1837-39) [one of the most successful early Catholic novels, to which Agnew later wrote a sequel, Rome and the Abbey; spawned at least one Protestant riposte, Gerald]
Charlotte Anley, Miriam; Or, the Power of Truth (1826) [good early example of the Jewish conversion novel]
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814) [look, a canonical novelist! Lots of recent scholarship on Austen's Anglican and evangelical connections]
Amelia Bristow, Sophia de Lissau (1826) [first in Bristow's series of Jewish conversion novels, mostly about the same family]
J. W. Cunningham, The Velvet Cushion (1814) [very popular "object narrative" that relates the history of religion in England since the reign of Mary I from the perspective of, yes, a prayer cushion]
Maria Edgeworth, Harrington (1817) [important early philosemitic novel; in print]
Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) [English vs. Scottish ways in late-18th c. rural Scotland, emphasizing a capacious--but not "enthusiastic"--Christianity; recently reprinted]
Barbara Hofland, The History of an Officer's Widow, and Her Young Family (1809) [first of Hofland's didactic tales, in which righteousness receives its providential reward]
Grace Kennedy, Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Story (1823) [formula-setting controversial novel, endlessly copied and subverted (including in at least six Catholic novels)]
Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) [another trendsetter, emphasizing practical, evangelical Christianity; in print]
Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray; Or, Mothers and Daughters (1804) [the moral pitfalls posed by, among other things, radical attitudes to sexuality; in print]
Rev. Legh Richmond, Annals of the Poor (1814) [fictionalized tracts about Richmond's pastoral work, including the famous The Dairyman's Daughter]
Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814) [evangelicalism in the imperial context]
---, The History of Henry Milner (1822) [a young boy's godly education, and one of Sherwood's better-known short novels]
---, The History of the Fairchild Family (1818-47) [famous for the gibbet episode, among other things]
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Derry: A Tale of the Revolution (1833) [historical novel about the Siege of Derry; by the 1840s, this was already a "go-to" example of religious fiction for literary critics]
Frances Trollope, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) [satire of evangelicalism]