'Grace Aguilar's defence of Jewish difference: Representing women's reading'

Alongside her meditations on Jewish practice and history, Grace Aguilar (1816–47) also wrote stories devoid of Jewish content and advised her female readers to ‘look to [their] English Bibles’. Consequently, contemporaries and critics have claimed that her work assimilates Evangelical literary models. The trope of women’s reading in her fiction, however, and the theorisation of this practice in The Spirit of Judaism (1842) indicates that for Aguilar, valorising women’s capacity for textual interpretation works to defend against apostasy, thus improving the status of the Jews in Protestant England.