Robert Orange

A Catholic convert stands for Parliament, is loved by two women and married to neither in any way the Church will accept, and must decide what he owes his faith when it costs him everything else. Pearl Craigie wrote as John Oliver Hobbes, converted at twenty-four, and knew the collision she was describing from the inside; her epigrams were compared to Wilde's, and she died at forty-one. Sixty plates by painters including James Tissot and John Collier follow the novel's world of drawing rooms, weddings, ambition and faith from 1750 to 1915.