D. Bruce Hindmarsh's The Evangelical Conversion Narrative indirectly clarifies some of the narrative strategies behind Victorian religious historical fiction. To a very considerable degree, religious historical novels are fictionalized conversion narratives; while this pattern is most evident in the work of the evangelical novelists, it's also true (albeit with different protocols) of Catholic authors like Lady Georgiana Fullerton and John Henry Newman. Even a Jewish novelist like Grace Aguilar can be seen working against the conversion model in The Vale of Cedars.
This interface between conversion narratives and historical fiction frequently poses problems for the contemporary critic, although not necessarily for the Victorian author. As Hindmarsh points out, evangelical conversion narratives usually take place in an entirely providential historical register, in which the individual's conversion reworks Scriptural conflicts (and, not surprisingly, often features special guest appearances by Christ, God, and Satan). The "history" in question, that is, is not the Enlightenment stage theory that undergirds Scott's work, nor the quest (not necessarily successful) for organic knowledge that crops up in Eliot's. In religious historical fiction, conversion narratives frequently seem to abstract the characters from their proper historical context--hence the potentially polemical use-value of such novels, which can transpose the seventeenth century onto the nineteenth. But, the authors would counter, "abstract" is precisely the wrong word: in the agonies of conversion, the characters find themselves conscious for the first time of divine history. In other words, a history more "real" than that of the mundane world.
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