Vulnerable women and the danger of gliding jesuits: England in the nineteenth century

Abstract

By the middle of the nineteenth century, fiction that was overtly anti-Catholic was being written for a religiously-aware middle class. Some of this writing was presented as based on fact and produced in the form of a novel. Much of the literature explored the themes of sex and/or death and whether the style was lurid or restrained, it was evidently gendered. Popular motifs, such as convents, confession, scheming Jesuits (both male and female), the danger of Catholic girls' schools and the constant surveillance carried out by the Catholic Church had more to do with the protection of innocent, young Protestant girls than with theological debate. This article is concerned with the way that the anti-papal backlash triggered by the “papal aggression” is reflected, in its various guises, in the literature of some nineteenth-century female authors. The church of Rome stands guilty, and glories in the crime of binding down young and inexperienced girls by a vow which can never be shaken off to a life which they may find, when their woman's nature develops itself, they are unfit for.[1]