Reminiscing about reading Victorian religious fiction, 1915

Memories of reading Victorian religious fiction tend to be scattered far and wide.  Here's a glum assessment from the Catholic author Agnes Repplier (1855-1950), who gave controversial fiction a sound thrashing on more than one occasion.  It appeared in the Catholic World, a long-lived magazine published by the Paulist Press.

[...]Fiction, designed by the relenting fates to be our solace and diversion, took arms and pricked us nastily. When I was a little girl, the stories in my convent library betrayed the trust I put in them. They followed the principle set forth sardonically by Mr. Henry Harland's cardinal (he who lost and found his snuff-box)—that is, they steeped themselves in controversy, and invited their heretic to a course of instruction. I, poor child, fresh from catechism and Christian doctrine, was assailed by these false friends, as though I had been the heretic in question, and badgered as shamefully as I have been badgered since by Robert Elsmere and John Ward, Preacher, and the whole kit and crew of controversial novels. May the waves of oblivion close over their heads, and the story-reading world find peace!  ("Catholic Letters and the Catholic World," The Catholic World April 1915: 35.)

It's probably not news to most readers that didacticism frequently failed, or inspired resistance, or prompted subversive appropriation (in the sense of undermining or inverting the author's intent--people who converted to Catholicism after reading Grace Kennedy's anti-Catholic Father Clement being the most obvious example).  But knowing that readers often reacted badly to didacticism, and actually keeping that in mind when setting up an argument, are two different things.  In any event, by conflating the experience of reading two novels about the rejection of orthodoxy with novels designed to inculcate it, Repplier suggests that didactic fiction throttles the impulses that produced it in the first place.  Repplier insists that novels should be a place of play; the controversial novel, by contrast, reveals a naked thirst for power.  And inasmuch as controversial novels were often written for the believer, not those on the other side of the equation, their attempt to brutalize those already convinced turns out to be a self-defeating, internal invasion--stealing their own property, as it were.  Novels with a mission turn out to be traitors not only to the reader, but to the novel itself.   And inept ones, at that.