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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
She has plunged into the grossest apostasy in principle, and produced the direst immorality in practice. Her outward glory is the covering of the corruption of the grave.
Reverend John Cumming, Lectures on Romanism (1850)Auricular Confession is always a secret thing. Both penitent and Father Confessor are expected to respect the secrecy of the confessional. Were it a public transaction it would lose its attraction to a certain class of minds, and the power of the priest would cease to exist.
Walter Walsh, The Secret History of the Oxford Movement (1897)“[P]hysicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century.”
Robert Audley, in Lady Audley's Secret (1862)In his posthumously published autobiography, Montague Summers, who with The Gothic Quest, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, and other works moved the Gothic into the realm of literary scholarship, described his admiration of the mid-nineteenth-century sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a type of “fascination”: “She knew how much I admired her novels, and she knew that I was sincere. In fact, once or twice she gently bantered me about heroine worship. She was indeed one of the most fascinating women whom I have ever met.” In turning to the language of “fascination,” Summers invokes a trope not only fundamental to the Gothic depiction of the hypnotic seductions of Catholic deviances that I have already described but one that is also central to Braddon's sensation-novel aesthetic.
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