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“The Air Is Blue with Robert Elsmere”: The Public Reading of Theological Novels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Anne DeWitt Open the ORCID record for Anne DeWitt [Opens in a new window]
Anne DeWitt*
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New York University, New York, New York, USA
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Abstract

The popularity of Mary Ward's novel Robert Elsmere (1888) has been attributed to readers who identified with the title character's loss of faith. This article offers a new account of Robert Elsmere's sales as it considers the book alongside John Inglesant (1881), another best-selling novel of religious experience. I argue that readers were drawn not to the representation of the protagonists’ experience but to the chance the books offered of exploring an expanding range of religious positions. Their appeal thus lay not in their resonances with private religious experience but in the way they fostered what I call “public reading.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 2022 , pp. 355 - 384
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Annmarie Drury, Andrew Goldstone, Eugenia Kisin, Greg Vargo, Mimi Wimmick, and the anonymous readers of VLC for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. I would also like to thank the British Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and Special Collections at the Claremont Colleges Library for their assistance with materials in their archives.

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