The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (1897)

This is a serious change of direction. Hobbes' first four novels were short, Wildean aphorism-fests. Then she broke into more tragic territory with her fifth and sixth, still retaining something of the lighter tone. This seventh one is not only historical and serious, but running I think in the wake of Anthony Hope's phenomenally successful The Prisoner of Zenda in its Ruritanian qualities. Perhaps in the aftermath of Oscar Wilde's trial, perhaps feeling she had exhausted her Aesthetic vein, she embarks on a political tale enlivened by intrigue, Catholicism, and pan-European events and characters. The lead is taken by Robert Orange, a young gun in the Disraeli mold, who slowly realises politics is his game whilst also gaining an appreciation of the fair form and spirit of Brigit, an illegitimate archduchess of (fictional) Alberia, whose mother had been his first taste of love. Her Catholicism moves him to convert and, having just gained a seat in parliament, he heads off to Spain to help her intrigue in Don Carlos' cause! I can feel Scott in this, and Sand is surely an inspiration too, and possibly Dumas. It is the strange backwards step of it in literary terms which is the most intriguing. Not many 'decadent' period wits stepped back into augustitude and the mid-Victorian. Where will she go next?