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Labour, Love, and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914. By Andrea Ebel Brozyna. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion 2. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. xvi + 291x pp. $65.00 cloth.

Thomas Pooley, an obscure blasphemer that predated Foote, helped inspire Hardy's narrative. This book has much to recommend it. Marsh recasts familiar Victorian themes within a poststructuralist framework; she provides forgotten contexts to the major works of canonical writers; she buttresses her arguments with vivid material from archival sources; she writes lively, engaging prose. Her book represents a thoughtful contribution to literary studies. Yet, historians of Victorian England may be less impressed. Marsh continually overstates her case. The Foote episode deserves scrutiny, but historians deeply familiar with the 1880s might pause before calling it "the defining trial, and a defining event, of its decade" (17). No one doubts the Victorian crisis of faith, but it is an oversimplification on both ends to claim that "the Bible entered the nineteenth century as the sacred repository of historical truth and exited it a literary masterpiece" (169). Then too, Marsh's imaginative connections between various blasphemy trials and major Victorian authors depend on a chain of suppositions and circumstantial evidence. Crucial arguments pivot on sentences that begin with "perhaps" or "it would not be fanciful to trace" or "it is wholly possible then." If Thomas Pooley lurks behind Jude the Obscure, "Hardy left no testimony to the influence of his case" (296). Like its subject matter, Word Crimes remains a revealing document of its own time.