The Brontë sisters belong to those writers on whom so much has been written that a new full-length work calls for an explicit excuse, if not an apology. Such an excuse must incorporate the element of novelty, the raison d'être of any additional publication in an already well-researched field. Beyond that, the writer can only hope that the novelty will be perceived as part of a useful endeavour.

As no previous scholar has devoted a whole book to an attempt to situate the Brontë novels in the context of early and mid nineteenth-century religion – at least not a book readily available to students and researchers – this one may lay claim to being new in the sense that it attempts to do something that has not been done before on the same scale. So far, so good; but a writer who proposes to add a ‘first’ to a mass of scholarship and criticism that includes hundreds of books must pause to wonder whether the reason for the lack of predecessors might be that the undertaking has seemed unnecessary in the past. A natural, and somewhat disturbing, corollary is the worry that such an attitude was – and remains – justified.

That worry may be articulated in two separate queries: has enough work been done on the Brontës and religion in the existing chapters, essays and articles by various authors, so that an entire book exclusively devoted to this line of enquiry is superfluous?