Robert Elsmere

An Oxford-trained clergyman takes up a country parish full of conviction, then loses his footing when the German biblical criticism of scholars like David Strauss dissolves his belief in the miraculous foundations of Christianity. Mrs. Humphry Ward follows Robert Elsmere’s slow break with the Anglican Church and the strain it places on his marriage to Catherine, a woman of deep and unquestioning piety, before he settles into a practical faith built on social work among the London poor. First published in 1888, the book sold in the hundreds of thousands and drew a lengthy public rebuttal from Gladstone. It became one of the defining novels of the Victorian crisis of faith, dramatizing how ordinary believers lived through the collision between honest doubt and inherited religion.