Emma’s crisis of religious faith

Emma Harte’s crisis of religious faith is a lasting rejection of the God she holds responsible for her mother’s suffering and death, but it does not make religion irrelevant to her life. Instead, belief returns as a practical and emotional question in the rituals surrounding her children and friends: Emma refuses Christian doctrine for herself while making room for other people’s faith and the comforts it offers.

The death that breaks belief

The crisis comes into the open at Elizabeth Harte’s deathbed. As Jack Harte comforts his grieving daughter and says that Elizabeth is free from suffering, he attributes her death to God’s will. Emma answers with fierce disbelief: if God existed, she argues, he would not have allowed her mother to suffer for years or to die. She runs from the bedroom and out of the house, leaving Jack alone with his grief. Her rejection is rooted not in abstract argument but in the sight of prolonged suffering and the failure of religious consolation to make that suffering bearable.

The scene establishes a sharp contrast between father and daughter. Jack finds some comfort in the thought that Elizabeth is at peace; Emma cannot accept that explanation and turns her grief into accusation. Her flight toward the moors gives the rupture a physical force: she leaves the room where death has been given a religious meaning, while Jack remains beside his wife’s body. From then on, Emma’s atheism is tied to an intimate loss rather than presented as a passing provocation.

Objects, ritual, and respect for belief

After Elizabeth’s death, Emma encounters the material traces of her mother’s faith while searching through her belongings. Among the jewellery in a wooden box, she finds the gold cross and chain Elizabeth had almost always worn. She drops them aside, unwilling to keep reminders of a God she no longer believes exists. Her response makes disbelief tangible: the cross is not merely an inherited ornament but a religious object she cannot accept as part of her own life. She also refuses to attend Sunday school, despite Jack’s annoyance.

Her atheism does not prevent her from observing another family’s religious practice with attention and sympathy. At a meal with the Kallinskis, Emma watches Janessa Kallinski light candles and pray, then sees Abraham Kallinski bless wine and bread. The meal includes the recitation of the kiddush and the breaking of bread she herself had rescued. Emma is welcomed into the family’s table, and the warmth she experiences there strengthens her opposition to the antisemitism directed at Jewish people in Leeds. The episode distinguishes her rejection of belief from hostility toward religion: she can refuse faith for herself and still recognize the tenderness, fellowship, and care sustained by religious observance.

Edwina’s baptism and the limits of secrecy

The question of baptism becomes personal when Emma worries that her daughter, Edwina Harte, might grow up believing in God and resent having been left unbaptized. Emma insists that she remains an atheist, but her concern is for the child’s future choice rather than for her own return to Christianity. She cannot simply approach a vicar: the baptism would require a birth certificate, and Emma fears that the document would expose Edwina’s illegitimate birth and invite others into a private matter.

Blackie O’Neill offers to baptize the child himself. Though a lapsed Catholic who no longer attends church, he says that he has not lost his faith and believes God’s presence and love matter more than a priest, church, or font. Emma is astonished, but understands that his offer is sincere. The home baptism lets her address her daughter’s possible future wishes without surrendering her own disbelief or exposing the family to the scrutiny she fears.

The birth registration brings the same conflict into the law. Emma knows she must give the registrar a father’s name and does not want to identify Edwin Fairley. Blackie proposes putting his own name on the certificate rather than leaving the father unknown, and insists on accompanying Emma to the registrar. His practical protection links a religious act of care to the social vulnerability of an illegitimate child: the baptism can welcome Edwina into a faith community, while the false paternal name helps shield the identity Emma is determined to conceal.

Deathbed ritual and later accommodation

Years later, Laura O’Neill asks Emma to ensure that Bryan O’Neill is brought up as a good Roman Catholic and to care for him while his father is away at war. As Laura’s condition worsens, a priest arrives to administer extreme unction. Emma experiences him as a sign of approaching death and inwardly rejects the possibility that God can intervene. She cannot bring herself to voice the protest aloud, but her silent anger repeats the grief-driven refusal first expressed at Elizabeth’s death. Laura’s goodness makes the ritual’s language of sin especially painful to Emma: she cannot reconcile the friend’s suffering with the religious framework unfolding beside the bed.

Emma’s later agreement to Daisy’s christening in a Leeds church shows accommodation rather than a stated conversion. Paul McGill is allowed to attend, and the ceremony proceeds without incident; Emma takes Daisy back to London the next day. As with Edwina, the choice places a child’s religious observance within the family’s complicated circumstances without establishing that Emma has recovered her own faith. Across these episodes, her defining position remains consistent: she refuses belief as an explanation for suffering, yet takes seriously the emotional needs, customs, and choices of the people she loves.