Sacred Engagements

Scholars of the history of the novel have traditionally approached it to seek signs of increasing secularization, rather than to document the ways religion, politics, and individuals came into contact and conflict in the genre. Conway's groundbreaking book, in turning close attention to the interfaith marriage plot, both helpfully expands and productively complicates the stories we've told about the realist novel. Sacred Engagements is original, admirably researched, and beautifully written.

Sacred Engagements reveals the history of religious toleration hiding in plain sight in novels by Richardson, Brooke, Inchbald, Edgeworth, and Austen, where interfaith marriage tests what it means to tolerate painful religious difference in the private sphere without demanding conversion. Conway reframes a postsecular account of novelistic ethics in the wake of Sir Charles Grandison that foregrounds women's voices and religious claims of conscience.

Conway's necessary readings of interfaith marriage in British novels from Richardson to Edgeworth show how mechanisms of toleration make room for, and interweave with, faith traditions. This is an exquisitely crafted and cogently theorized book, sure to reorient future histories of literature, religion, and secularization.

Conway advances a perceptive and original claim with far-reaching implications—that the interfaith marriage plot centers on the misfit between the religious autonomy guaranteed both sexes by toleration theory and the need for the curtailment of women's religious rights to maintain uniformity in the home. Sacred Engagements's bold feminist argument will make waves in work on the postsecular eighteenth century as well as on the early novel.