Abstract
Accounts of the English novel's development often stress religious precursors, such as forms of self-analysis, improvement, and preparation for the fulfillment of one's identity, and most studies have focused on Protestant traditions. Other denominations may provide keys to literary interpretation, however, as Bridget Keegan shows in her analysis of a late-eighteenth-century novel, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791). Keegan uses the novel's representation of core Jesuit "charisms," the goals of Ignatian spirituality, to shed light on what has seemed inexplicable about its characters and puzzling or even contradictory in its structure and themes.