MY SUBJECT is doubly suspect: polemical religious fiction by Frances Trollope. Victorian Studies has, of course, always stressed the centrality of religion to nineteenth-century culture. Yet, paging through Robert Lee Wolff's magisterial 1977 Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England, what is striking is how little advantage has been taken of his work, how few of the fictions he describes have made their way into critical conversation about the Victorian novel. In 1989 John Sutherland mapped what he called the unexplored “lost continent” of non-canonical Victorian fiction (1). Modernism's lingering legacy has meant, I would argue, that novels of religious controversy by women continue to comprise one of that continent's darkest reaches.For general surveys of nineteenth-century Anglo-American religious fiction, see Franchot, Leavis, Maison, Reynolds, Wolff. More specific studies of individual writers and works are beginning to be done, as suggested by new work presented at the 1998 18th- and 19th-Century Women Writers Conference (e.g., Cronin; Freed; Griffin, “Fathers”; LaMonaca; Melnyk).