The nemesis of faith tells the story of the spiritual and intellectual crisis – and its consequences – facing a newly ordained young clergyman, Markham Sutherland, educated at Oxford at the height of the Oxford Movement and torn between Roman Catholocism and atheism. Unable to find his bearings, he tries to work out his life, first in a series of letters to a friend, then in a series of ‘confessions’. The letters and the confessions form the first two parts of the book; they are followed by a third part in which Markham Sutherland’s subsequent fateful story is unfolded.

This partly autobiographical novel by the famous historian and biographer of Thomas Carlyle created a scandal when first published, and a copy of it was ceremoniously burned at the behest of an Oxford don as a result of its religious and moral frankness.

In her introduction, the first the book has been given for over eighty years, Rosemary Ashton brings it refreshingly to life by identifying the real people behind some of its leading characters, and by setting it in the context of the intellectual milieu out of which it grew and which it mirrored with such distrubing accuracy.

Published by Libris in 1988