Some Aspects of Modern British Catholic Literature: Apologetic in the Novels of Josephine Ward

Abstract

However strongly some authors may oppose the adjective ‘Catholic’ as limiting their vocation, a recognisable body of British Catholic literature does exist from the mid-nineteenth century. Its boundaries are not always easily definable since its origins are mixed. It was moulded initially by pre- and post-Emancipation renewals, the number and energy of the new converts from the Oxford Movement, the effects of Irish immigration, and the anti-Catholic rhetoric in both Protestant revivals and rising liberal secular thought. As a result British Catholicism formed a distinctive apologetic, which marked its literature from the beginning. Thus, Newman’s Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848) made the case for Catholicism against Elizabeth Harris’s novel, From Oxford to Rome, and in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (1851) he defended the faith during the ‘Papal Aggression’ fury. Similarly, both Wiseman and Newman responded to anti-Catholic caricatures in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1851) with their own fictional depictions of the early Church, Fabiola (1854) and Callista (1856) respectively.