Between 1868 and 1893, Emily Sarah Holt (1836-1893) published just over 40 historical novels, as well as a few biographies, tracts and a work of social history. Nearly all of her work was published by John F. Shaw and Co., of London, which kept some of her novels in print through the late 1920s. There is a good article on Holt by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, in Clio's Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790-1899 edited by Lynette Felber (University of Delaware Press, 2007), where she comments: Holt's project is both vast and ambitious. She constructs an explicitly Protestant and reactionary history of Britain through fiction in order to oppose the dangers of both Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism...Holt represents an exceptionally energetic case of the antitolerationist position. Burstein examines Holt's fascination with John Wycliffe and the Lollards, which she explored in both fiction and biography; for Holt, I suggest, Lollard conversion and martyrdom model an ideal mode of Christian being-in-history. I have all of Holt's historical novels - bar five - many in first edition.
Her first was Mistress Margery (1868) Her last was The Gold that Glitters (1896)
I append the full list below, which shows her fascination with the mid-14th to the late 16th centuries. This is explained by her focus on Lollardy and the Tudor Reformation (which included the horrors of Mary's reign). The books in Red in Bold Font I have in first edition. Those in Red in Italic Font I have New Edition copies. Those in Black font I have no copies of.
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