Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901) is widely known as the novelist of the Oxford Movement. John Keble was the vicar of the parish in which both of them lived for thirty years, and they formed a close association in which he acted as her mentor and spiritual adviser. She wrote nearly twenty novels, many of them bestsellers in their day. None contain overt preaching, since ‘reserve’ was Keble's watchword, but as Gavin Budge shows in this comprehensive literary analysis, her ‘providential plots’ are structured around ‘the operation of grace’. This approach, he suggests, has alienated modern critics but is comprehensible in the context of intuitionist philosophy and associationist psychology, both of which influenced Victorian writers. Three chapters are devoted to one novel, The heir of Redclyffe, in order to offer a detailed consideration of the exquisite moral sensibility which governed the fate of her characters. A young couple, for example, are punished with lifelong marital unhappiness for the ‘crime’ of concealing their initial attachment from the lady's parents. Yonge's depiction of the strength and power of women's moral influence is the focus of another chapter and is defined by Budge as a ‘conservative form of feminism’. This stretches the meaning of the word, however, since Yonge rejected the idea of female suffrage and in Womankind (1877) declared her ‘full belief in the inferiority of women’. However, the careful analysis of Yonge's plots and characterisation, and of the all-pervading influence of religion in her work, makes this volume extremely valuable, indeed unique.