Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the
1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and
especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their
glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began to take her loyal
following of gothic and family-saga readers into unexpected
psychological and theological depths, while taking to an extreme, with a
serious-novel format, the experiments begun in her family sagas. She
also introduced to her readers a character only half-alive in Trollope,
the Anglican Church.