Anne Bronte and the religious novel in the early nineteenth century

To the introspective, sensitive, religious individual, the opening years of the 19th century must have indeed appeared to be a “Fire-Whirlwind” in which destruction in creation were simultaneous and immediate. It was an era of religious transition and uncertainty. The traditional religious beliefs and values were rapidly crumbling, in new currents of thought proliferated. Writing in 1884, J. A. Froude recalled that the first half of the century had been “an era of new ideas, of swift if silent spiritual revolution…. All were agreed to have done with compromise and conventionalities…. The present generation which has grown up in an open spiritual ocean and has learned to swim for itself will never know what it was to find the lights all drifting , the compass all awry, and nothing left to steer but by the stars.