“The Air Is Blue with Robert Elsmere”: The Public Reading of Theological Novels

Abstract

The popularity of Mary Ward's novel Robert Elsmere (1888) has been attributed to readers who identified with the title character's loss of faith. This article offers a new account of Robert Elsmere's sales as it considers the book alongside John Inglesant (1881), another best-selling novel of religious experience. I argue that readers were drawn not to the representation of the protagonists’ experience but to the chance the books offered of exploring an expanding range of religious positions. Their appeal thus lay not in their resonances with private religious experience but in the way they fostered what I call “public reading.”