Josephine Hope was born in Westminster, London, on 18 May 1864 to James Robert Hope-Scott, a lawyer, and Lady Victoria Alexandrina Fitzalan Howard, who was the daughter of the late Henry Fitzalan-Howard, Duke of Norfolk.
Both parents had died by 1873, and the children were adopted by their maternal grandmother, Augusta Minna Howard, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and brought up first at Arundel Castle and from 1877 at Uckfield in East Sussex.
[1][2][3] The family lived at Freshwater, Isle of Wight, then briefly at Hampstead, and then at Eastbourne in East Sussex, before settling in 1901 at Dorking in Surrey.
[7] She was particularly concerned with elucidating character, writing in a 1908 article that "the greatest drama is the unfolding of the action of the will as it adheres to or thwarts the Divine purpose".
[7] It appeared a year after Mary Augusta Ward's popular novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale, and was seen by some contemporary reviewers as a rebuttal of the earlier work.
[8] The literary scholar Bernard Bergonzi, writing on the centenary of its publication, characterises One Poor Scruple as "an early example of what was later described as the 'Catholic novel'", as written by Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and David Lodge.
[1] A contemporary review in The New York Times praises the novel's "original" plot and lively, realistic characterisations; it describes the author as showing "a breadth, a tolerance, a heartfelt piety".
[10] Out of Due Time followed in 1906, and addresses the subject of a progressive individual who comes into conflict with the Church;[3] the poet Alfred Noyes characterises it as a "study of the modernist mind at war with itself".
[8] Perry Worden, in a contemporary New York Times review, hails the novel a "masterpiece of fiction" that "handles a difficult subject with rare tact and courtesy", despite being "a bit too heavily freighted with its theology".
[8] Great Possessions (1909) draws sympathetic portraits of Church of England clergymen;[7] Erb describes it as expressing the author's "delight in ambiguity".
[8] Horace Blake (1913), her last work before the First World War, is described in her Times obituary as an "ambitious attempt" to depict a great man who falls morally, and the effect on his relatives and friends.
Herbert Gorman, in a contemporary review for The New York Times, describes it as "vividly conceived and historically accurate", while noting its inherent bias.
[7] The year after her death, three of her novels (One Poor Scruple, Out of Due Time and The Job Secretary) were reprinted by Sheed and Ward, prefaced by an "appreciation" by Noyes.