In 1825 the idea of religious communities for women within the Church of England was almost inconceivable: by 1900, over ninety sisterhoods had been founded and were operating within that church. Although the first community was not founded until 1845, the idea had been under discussion in ‘advanced’ anglican circles since the late 1830s, but little or nothing was done until a committee agreed to fund the establishment of the Park Village Sisterhood in the slums near King's Cross. This was the only attempt to found a religious community by committee during the Victorian period: the committee of gentlemen, which included Gladstone, E. B. Pusey and Lord John Manners, were unable to find a suitable woman to lead the society. After a few years of floundering half-life, Park Village was absorbed by Ascot Priory, the community founded by the charismatic and controversial Priscilla Sellon.

Later foundations followed an entirely different path. Communities were ordinarily established by individual women of extraordinary character, who felt called to devote their lives to God and to the poor. Some worked closely with a male co-founder; others avoided such associates as much as possible. Only the rare women who were convinced that they had a vocation to found a religious community would be able to withstand the opprobrium and hostility that greeted the early foundations. Victorian sisterhoods were accused of being outposts of Fenianism, of being Roman catholic orders in disguise, of holding women against their will, of financial chicanery, of cruelty to members and to those for whom they cared and of allowing free rein to power-mad and sadistic mothers superior. None of these accusations was true. But the outpouring of paranoia which greeted the early sisterhoods suggests that they pinched a painful nerve in the Victorian psyche. Combining as they did authority and autonomy for women with anglo-catholic theology, there was something in sisterhoods to offend almost all the taboos of this profoundly paternalistic and fiercely protestant culture.

Founders of successful communities were powerful women, whose combination of leadership and charisma meant that they could not only attract, but keep, other women as members of the order. In these early days of anglican religious orders there was little of dignity or beauty to appeal to those whose primary interest was aesthetic.