This chapter uses the 1808 publication of Hannah More’s unlikely best-seller, the novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife to explore the ways that Romantic authors responded to heightened competition by writing novels that they identify as explicitly ephemeral – works intended to be read and relevant in their contemporary moment rather than valued in posterity. Within two years of Coelebs’ publication, other authors had produced at least six full-length response novels, which imitated, continued, parodied, or mocked the original work. The authors of these works embrace the idea of literary production as time-sensitive and transient: rather than fearing or fighting the phenomenon, they capitalize on the fast-paced literary culture of the time to emphasize their own works’ timeliness and contemporary relevance. If there are too many books, one must read and write faster; by the same token, however, the less time on the public stage each individual book demands, the more the field is opened for even greater numbers of novels.

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and “the novel” by focusing on a cross-section of religious questions having to do with belonging (domestic, national, global) and identity. It begins with a consideration the Evangelical Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), moves to a cluster of novels that contemplated domestic religious differences in the form of Catholics and Jews, and concludes with a shift outside the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom and Ireland to examine early novelistic responses to overseas missionary movements, which raised challenging questions about empire, race, and religious community.

When influential philosophers prior to the Enlightenment such as Leibniz and Malebranche speculate about the interior life of ‘Man’ they presuppose the elect, saved man. This continues to be the case with Pierre Nicole and Jacques-Joseph Duguet, whose writings coincide with Jansenism’s turn towards a movement of political opposition to absolutism that ended up in Jacobinism. The shadows cast by predestination can still be detected even in Locke and Montesquieu, regarded as the founding figures of the Enlightenment. The theory of election would retain a subliminal presence in the history of the human sciences of the eighteenth century. So too would their increasing preoccupation with causality in psychological and social identity; out of the causes for election and reprobation came the imputation of causes for developmental normality and abnormality (‘idiocy’, ‘imbecility’ etc.) in the history of medicine.