Mary Cholmondeley's people were Anglicans and had been for many generations. Her father, Revd Richard Hugh Cholmondeley, was the rector of St Luke's Church in the village of Hodnet in Shropshire, England. He assumed the living of his father, and stepfather, who had both been rectors of Hodnet before him, as had been his maternal grandfather and great-grandfather. An uncle, Bishop Reginald Heber, besides holding the Hodnet benefice, was a bishop in Calcutta where a statue was erected in his honour. He became famous for his hymns, many of which are familiar to most Protestants and Anglicans today. In addition, he published several volumes of poetry and sermons.

Her family's history was steeped in the Church of England, but by the time Cholmondely was writing her novels, she had cause to bemoan that the Anglican Church had become as insipid as weak tea when once it was as crucial as one's daily bread. In The Making of Victorian England, G. Kitson Clark makes a convincing case that except for the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, in no other time than during the Victorian era did the ‘claims of religion occupy so large a part in the nation's life, or did men speaking in the name of religion contrive to exercise so much power’. In 1832 England, there were 140,000 church seats for a population of 1,380,000. By 1851, an additional 2,529 churches were built that cost about £9 million, in expectation that all of the empire would get itself to services on Sunday. As the long century wore on, though, half of the pew space remained empty and most of it filled by the lower classes. A census in 1851 indicated that 66 per cent of the available seats on any given Sunday were left empty, and those statistics would become even more dire.

It was a shocking realization to rectors like Revd Cholmondeley, and to his daughter, that every week fewer pews were being filled. Beginning with the 1880s, all over the United Kingdom, church attendance was on the decline.