Catholic Fiction

Abstract This chapter surveys popular fiction written about and by Catholics in England and Ireland when the consumption and production of fiction rose dramatically. It selects a range of novels to explore authorial preoccupations in relation to Catholicism. Setting fiction at the time of the early Church or of the Reformation and Elizabethan Settlement enabled English authors to explore the nature of English identity, Church doctrine, and the question of Catholic loyalty to Crown and State. Notably, preoccupations did not include the Irish Catholic migrants. Irish Catholic fiction of the same era sought to counter the ways that Catholics were perceived in Britain and to assert Catholic respectability. Novelists who wrote for the Irish diaspora, however, advocated a more vigorous Catholicism and by the early twentieth century this trend had influenced fiction in Ireland too. By this time Catholic novelists became more focused on Catholicism’s response to the modern world.