ABSTRACT
One of Emma Jane Worboise's novels demonstrates clearly the tendency of women's theological "sermons" to concern themselves simultaneously with religious issues and women's issues: Overdale, or the Story of a Pervert. As the very title of the novel indicates, the story of Overdale, the conflict between clergyman and lay-women, between monolithic clerical authority and the individualist rebels, is the center of interest for the novel. But the romance plot remains important, because it is that the Evangelical polemic and the feminist polemic most closely coincide. Gone are all the restrictions that exclude women from public, religious authority: the religious and the feminist polemics have succeeded together. Women's theological sermons were supposed to inculcate one set of doctrines and stop the spread of contrary doctrines or systems, although in practice, partly because of the genre's multivocalism, they often did more than that–and sometimes less.
