| This study, in exploring the impact of women's religious beliefs on the development of novelistic realism in Victorian Britain, challenges prevailing scholarly notions that literary realism was an exclusively secular phenomenon, one defining itself in opposition to more idealized Christian worldviews. In response to popular fiction which displaced devotional literature's traditional emphasis on religious salvation with more immediate, earthbound gratifications of romantic love, marriage, and motherhood, midcentury female novelists---namely, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Missing Sewell, George Eliot, and Lady Georgiana Fullerton---sought to reconcile fictional form with their religious and/or spiritual values. By attempting to create fictional representations which privileged women's religious, spiritual, and moral integrity over the middle-class domestic ideals promulgated by popular fiction, these writers made two significant contributions in common: (1) By suggesting that domesticity and female sanctity were mutually incompatible, they challenged popular ideals which placed the home---and husbands---at the center of women's spiritual lives; and (2) by experimenting with narrative structures that did not hinge upon expected forms of development or closure (e.g., marriage and domestic bliss), these writers attempted to create more realistic representations of women and their lives, narrative forms foregrounding religious and ethical issues uniquely pertinent to Victorian women of faith. |
