Good intentions

There's something about religious and/or didactic fiction that compels even the most critical reader to conclude that there's a nice one-to-one correspondence between the text and the author's own religious beliefs. And then, as I did, you discover that one of your authors is, um, a bit on the shady side. (Make that a lot on the shady side, with possible paranoia to boot.) Revelations like that forcibly remind the reader that 19th c. religious fiction existed in relationship to a market: specific publishing houses demanded specific doctrinal positions; authors targeted niche audiences (the High Church reader, the anti-Catholic reader, etc.); particular "authorities" became shibboleths (J. H. Merle d'Aubigne, for example); etc. In other words, some authors "really, truly" believed what they wrote; others saw themselves satisfying a particular demand--or, perhaps, helping to create one. (The same is true of anti-Catholic autobiographers like, say, Charles Chiniquy or Theresa O'Gorman, who reinvented themselves according to the very specific demands of the late-19th c. Anglo-American evangelical publishing industry.) Even the authentic believers needed to adapt themselves to the generic demands of the didactic/religious novel in order to get themselves published.

Trying to sort the true believers from the aforementioned shady types can be tough, however, because in many cases we don't have any information. Leaving aside our old friend Anonymous and various one-shot wonders, even prolific authors often vanish without a trace. I've yet to find anything about Emma Leslie, who wrote a pile of historical novels during the second half of the 19th c. Three of Emily Sarah Holt's manuscripts migrated to North Carolina, the family is in Burke's Landed Gentry, and she's in the 1881 census, but that's about it. Some, like Eliza F. Pollard, had the good fortune--er, for us--to run out of money, and so we can read their Royal Literary Fund case files. Nevertheless, in many instances all we've got to go on is a spare paragraph or two, which doesn't necessarily help the literary historian's job. "X belonged to the Church of England" doesn't necessarily tell you much about what X thought of any particular doctrinal dispute within the Church of England. (Or, for that matter, if X actually understood any particular doctrinal dispute within the Church of England.) Religious fiction really seems to demand that we look for an author in the old-fashioned sense of the term, intentionality and all; it's just that so often there's no author to be found. A bit ironic, that.