The Victorian passion for progress has many iterations, not least in the voracious appetite for accounts of the individual's moral, intellectual and spiritual formation. The public relish for genres like the Bildungsroman and the novel of religious faith and doubt shows how certain fictive narratives took up territory occupied by the memoir and biography in order to illuminate the evolution of an individual subject. Crisis and transformation are key themes in the Victorian ‘spiritual quest’ plot where self-development is characterized by progress from ignorance to enlightenment, and thence salvation. Whether the focus is secular or religious, maturity is encoded as a form of redemption, and the process of growth a conversion from illusion and misapprehension to a new – and true – insight into selfhood. In its analysis of three best-selling novels from the later Victorian period – Lothair (1870), John Inglesant (1880), and Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) – this chapter shows how, in the last three decades of the century, emotionalized representations of Catholic conversion provide an imaginative structure for exploring the hidden forces that shape personality and determine belief and action.