ABSTRACT
The two sisters, Harriett and Jemima Newman, make up an interesting test case for the power of an extra-canonical genre, letter writing, to constitute a mode of both theological and cultural criticism. As subjects, Harriett and Jemima remain both more individualized and more marginalized than their contemporaries. They grew up among highly quirky siblings and mingled with the intellectual spiritual elite of Oxford; Harriett even established herself as a writer of juvenile fiction. Where Jemima socialized her brother's spiritual quest by detailing its pastoral consequences, Harriett domesticates it by comparing the advent of a new church in the family to the appearance of a new and thoroughly disagreeable in-law. Jemima, John, and Harriett illustrate respectively the rival dangers of grounding religious belief within one's own culture, grounding it upon principles and institutions which claim to transcend culture, and refusing to ground it at all.
