RT Article
T1 Breadth from Dissent: Ada Ellen Bayly (‘Edna Lyall’) and Her Fiction
JF Studies in church history
VO 48
SP 349
OP 361
A1 Binfield, Clyde 1940-
LA English
YR 2012
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1917679939
AB Attitudes change. They broaden as well as contract. They reflect the permeation of dissenting ideas in apparently settled communities and the assimilation of conventionally accepted ideas by dissenters. The process is transformative. Literature is a prime medium for the transmission of ideas. It shapes attitudes. What, then, of the role of popular literature, especially fiction, in shaping the attitudes, especially the religious attitudes, of a rapidly growing, clearly intelligent and significandy female reading public? This paper considers an Anglican writer, formed in part by Dissent, whose work particularly appealed to Nonconformists exercising their citizenship in a complex but now promisingly open society. This Broad Churchwoman enlarged the minds of her readers in liberal directions without diminishing their Dissenting formation. She is now quite forgotten, but her apparently modest achievement was in fact considerable.
DO 10.1017/S0424208400001431