Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820 by Alison Conway (review)

Reviewed by: Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820 by Alison Conway Jayne Lewis Alison Conway, Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2023). Pp. 221; 7 b/w illus. $34.95 paper, $94.95 cloth. The long arm of the secularization thesis notwithstanding, Protestant religious ideology has long been visible as a crucible of the eighteenth-century British novel, even as the marriage plot emerged as its signature telos. Nonetheless, our current "postsecular" moment has brought overdue attention to the many faiths active alongside the Anglican and dissenting Protestant groups that dominated Britain's confessional landscape, guided its politics, and shaped its literary practices. Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820 explores the implications of interfaith romance—thus of believers, as the Apostle Paul fretted, potentially "unequally yoked with unbelievers"—for a marriage-minded genre's evolving ethical, political, and aesthetic identity. Conway shares Lisa O'Connell's recently developed position that the marriage plot complemented the "one flesh" imperative handed down from Eden to the Anglican sacraments that the 1753 Hardwicke Marriage Act politicized when it rendered them the law of the land. But while O'Connell's exploration of dissent from that imperative sticks with Protestant flesh, Conway introduces Spanish and Italian Jews; Italian, French, and Canadian Catholics; and the odd freethinker into the mix. The results are themselves mixed in the very best sense: complex, unpredictable, and generative. Conway separates considerations of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4) from Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) with meticulous examinations of Frances Brooke's "Canadian novel," The History of Emily Montague (1769), Maria Edgeworth's "Jewish" one, Harrington (1817), and the Catholic Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791). Each narrative raises, only to dash, the possibility of interfaith marriage. Conway stays open to the unseemly feelings, from disgust to open-ended desire, that close encounter with religious otherness entailed for [End Page 385] many Protestant English readers. In a context of colonial expansion, these include "unsettling" sensations provoked by new "differences within the nation—the moment when the familiar becomes unheimlich, when the advent of religious pluralism threatened to place a stranger in the marriage bed" (5). Though we might reasonably expect to end up in Gothic romance, Conway picks a different and more subtle poison, sticking to sentimental and domestic realist subgenres and honoring the commitment to moral pedagogy scripted into them. As Conway acknowledges, non-Protestant groups composed barely 2% of Britain's general population, with intermarriage rare. Confronting this reality, Conway's writers route the romance unrealized in their pages through other, more visible racial, national, ethnic, and political alliances. Yet Conway enlists the resulting complexities into a fresh and relevant dialogue with the novel's ever-shifting form. Besides: "all marriages . . . have the potential to take on a 'mixed' quality as they unfold" (2). No person who's ever been married can doubt it. This "'mixed' quality" brings sociopolitical history into fiction and the political discourse mobilized by Locke's 1689 Letter concerning Toleration into the household. Open-ended "conversation[s] about interfaith marriage" (2), mobilized by brutally "abbreviated" plots (39), challenge the Protestant complacency of a Lockean model that ties toleration to "an ethics of sociability" upholding the superficial religious pluralism legalized in the Williamite Toleration Act of 1689. Even as the ideal of unity sometimes feeds nascent discourses on racial purity, Conway's "'counterfactual' toleration history" identifies "the gendered division of affective labor that shapes political philosophy." Traditionally, women's often uniquely "strong religious feelings" domesticate political order by mobilizing "family uniformity" (7). But women who marry outside their own faith turn the household inside out. Made intimate, the fragmenting experience of toleration's limits invites the more immediate idiom of active pain tolerance. Adapting political phenomenologist Lars Tønder, Conway maintains that "active tolerance" "sustains more equitable relations by attending to the body's 'affective intensities'" at pain's threshold. "Until we learn to understand the pain we feel in the face of difference as productive, rather than destructive, we will experience tolerance as a burden" (10...

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