For the best-selling periodical Once a Week, Harriet Martineau wrote a pot-boiling story in 1861 called ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’. It tells the tale of an English squire’s daughter who devotedly takes the veil and, against the backdrop of the Henrician Reformation, emerges after a reasonably decorous series of vicissitudes to marry the honourable beau, Captain Fletcher. Together, they rescue a certain footstool belonging to Anna that had been appropriated by the abbess. Inside that footstool was concealed the very bible from which Anna had gained her first sense of the futility of the convent life and the oppressions of the Roman Catholic religion.