Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900 by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (review)

ensured a thorough yet accessible addition such that even scholars with some knowledge of the Book of Common Prayer will find something worthwhile in this biography. Toby F. Coley University of Mary Hardin-Baylor Miriam Elizabeth Burstein. Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014; Pp. ix + 300.: ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02238-9. ISBN-10: 0-268-022380, $39.00. Evangelical Edward Bickersteth thunders forth, in the introduction to Victorian Reformations, the grave state of apathy saturating nineteenth-century English Protestantism, ‘‘As Protestants we had greatly lost, through disuse and long ease and prosperity, the armour of the Reformation’’ (qtd. in Burstein 1). Bickersteth fears that ‘‘the plague of popery’’ is infiltrating the ranks of English Protestantism, and his fears are not completely unfounded as the nineteenth century bore witness to a resurgence of Catholicism in England after a long period of inactivity. Protestant and Catholic novelists alike turned their attention to the changing religious landscape and attempted to interpret the disturbances through the events and figures of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein proposes to turn her attention to Victorian historical fiction that addresses controversial religious moments from the past in order to interpret the present. The Victorian authors that Burstein discusses interpret current religious strife as either a continuation of the Reformation narrative or as an anomaly in the greater narrative of Christ’s church. While the presence of religious controversy in the works of canonical authors has been explored, Burstein sets her book apart by examining how the Reformation featured in works of popular religious authors, such as Deborah Alcock, A. D. Crake, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Frances Taylor, to name only a few of the over two dozen authors Burstein discusses. Burstein defends their importance by asserting that ‘‘controversial fiction played a crucial role in nineteenth-century popular religious and literary cultures, [and] any study of religion and literature that dismisses them in favor of canonical works will badly skew our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape’’ (2). These less recognized authors did three daring things in their work: they rewrote the moral assumptions of secular historical novels; they asserted that the most powerful moments in history are conversions ; and they connected their characters’ conversion experiences to the larger narrative of salvation history. The purpose of each of these features in religious historical novels is to narrate the religious turmoil from the past in order to speak to theological debates in the present with the hope of converting the reader. By examining the way in which history and religion combine in conversion Book Reviews 347 novels, Burstein aims to address the larger question of ‘‘understanding the complicated interface between literary and religious discourses’’ (7). The methodology Burstein uses in her book ‘‘combine[s] close reading with the interrelation of novelistic groups, as narrative patterns and thematic elements emerge, consolidate, and eventually disperse across time’’ (3). She explains that because the majority of the texts she analyzes are not canonical works and push an explicit agenda, critical methods that attempt to peel back the layers of meaning in a text falter when faced with works that so plainly present their message. Each of the chapters in her book addresses multiple novels and novelists united by similar methods or religious goals in their works, yet Burstein also analyzes the points of difference among authors with similar religious persuasions. The first four chapters focus on novels by Protestant authors, while the fifth examines the response by Catholic novelists to works with Protestant agendas. The sixth chapter and following coda discuss authors who undermine religious novelists’ interpretation and application of the Reformation to the nineteenth century. Burstein analyzes two canonical authors in detail—Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. Her first chapter focuses on Scott’s duology, The Monastery and The Abbot, in terms of the issue of reading the Bible in a post-Reformation world. Scott uses depictions of Bible reading in the duology to assert the irretrievability of Catholicism in modernity. While previous interpretations usually view the goal of his novels as an animation of the past, Burstein argues ‘‘the novels insist...