Susan Howatch’s global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the ’80s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch carried her loyal following of gothic and family saga readers into unexpected psychological and theological depths, while raising to a new level her experiments with narrative technique. She also introduced to her readers a character only half alive in Trollope, the Anglican Church. The twentieth-century church revealed in Howatch’s later fiction is a huge, sometimes monstrous, sometimes life-giving creature whose various dimensions make it entirely engaging and weirdly central to the centerless postmodern world.

Scandalous Truths provides a way into Howatch’s world by presenting for the first time some of her own articulations of her guiding principles, and by allowing a group of scholars to engage in a wide-ranging discussion of her art. A decade of scholarly presentations and articles now culminates in this book.

In the opening two essays the editors broadly explore Howatch’s oeuvre, focusing on her narrative method, epistemology, writing style, and expansions of genre. Both discuss the importance of Howatch’s pre-Starbridge novels, a point underlined further by Sarah Gamble’s analysis of Penmarric, employing current narrative theory to investigate Howatch’s use of multiple, shifting narrative perspectives. Elaine Lux, likewise interested in viewpoint as a tool in characterization, takes an approach informed by psychology. She invokes contemporary theories on the role of personal narration in therapy to argue that Howatch’s theme of healing applies to both characters and readers. The power of art to enhance the well-being of readers is a theme also in Karyn Sproles’s essay, applying the insights of Freud and Lacan to Howatch’s novels and to her own practice in reading them

Gayle Hamilton Gill shifts the emphasis to Jung, whose use by Christian psychotherapists has captured Howatch’s interest, and explores the theological implications of Jung’s language.

Howatch, a woman writing about men’s worlds, often adopts the viewpoint of a woman participating in, commenting on, and under- mining those worlds. Three essays consider feminism in Howatch’s novels; her character- izations of women and her implied political stances prove complex and problematic. Elizabeth Edwards traces an ambiguous and submerged feminism. Cheryl Forbes looks to figures in earlier church history for contexts in which to read Howatch’s women. Bonnie Shullenberger explores women’s roles in contemporary Anglican thinking, spirituality, and hierarchy. While wondering why Howatch peoples her novels with women so spiritually impoverished, she finds such portrayals relevant to women’s struggles in the church today.

Concluding Part I, William Kupersmith and Jan Waples illuminate Howatch’s artistry in the historical novel genre, showing how events and persons of the 1960s, and art works familiar in popular culture, become emblems of the personal struggles depicted in Scandalous Risks.

Part II offers four essays by Howatch, three of them previously unpublished. Her candor is disarming as she comments on the family saga genre, varieties of twentieth-century Anglican theology and their relation to her writing, the intersections of writing and healing, and the problematic label “Christian novel.”

LC 2005011817

ISBN 1-57591-096-9

Printed in the U.S.A.