Anglican Women Novelists

What do the novelists Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte M. Yonge, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy L. Sayers, Barbara Pym, Iris Murdoch and P.D. James all have in common? These women, and others, were inspired to write fiction through their relationship with the Church of England. This field-defining collection of essays explores Anglicanism through their fiction and their fiction through their Anglicanism. These essays, by a set of distinguished contributors, cover a range of literary genres, from life-writing and whodunnits through social comedy, children’s books and supernatural fiction. Spanning writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, they testify both to the developments in Anglicanism over the past two centuries and the changing roles of women within the Church of England and wider society.

[Anglican Women Novelists] makes a genuine contribution to literary history, women's history, and the history of the Anglican church., The collection offers a wonderful guide to a vein of female novel writing that has offered a sustained critical but sympathetic engagement with the Church of England for more than two hundred years., Both entertaining and enriching ... Shell's exploration of the theology of P. D. James is especially interesting ... [An] excellent essay., For anyone interested in women writers and religion – particularly its Anglican form – this is a fascinating read which deserves not one, but multiple readings ... Anglican Women Novelists lives up to the blurb on the back cover and I recommend it to readers of Sofia., This collection of essays will not only be enjoyed by many, but will, I hope, also encourage those now writing and those who might one day seek to do so.

Judith Maltby is Chaplain and Fellow of Corpus Christi College and Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, UK. As well as publishing widely on the history of Anglicanism, she is an occasional commentator on religion on BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian (2004-2011).Alison Shell is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London, UK. She has published widely on the relationship of Christianity and literature in Britain between the Reformation and the 21st century.