In the period between the theological controversies of the Oxford Movement
and the spiritual dramas of the Decadence, Catholic fiction in England was
generally undistinguished. The example of the most influential and widely r
ead Catholic novelists of the time, Lady Georgina Fullerton and her French
friend Mme. Augustus Craven, encouraged the production of badly written, po
orly constructed and mawkishly sentimental pietistic novels by other female
hands.