Scandalous Truths

Book excerpt: Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began to take her loyal following of gothic and family-saga readers into unexpected psychological and theological depths, while taking to an extreme, with a serious-novel format, the experiments begun in her family sagas. She also introduced to her readers a character only half-alive in Trollope, the Anglican Church.