A brilliant, poor young scientist fakes a religious conversion to court a clergyman's daughter and buy his way into respectable society, but his hidden contempt for the faith he's performing eats at him until the deception collapses and strips him of the life he engineered. He drifts abroad in disgrace and dies alone, far from home.
Books mentioned in Born in Exile (5)
The World before the Deluge by Louis Figuier: “His schoolmaster, aware of the unusual pursuits which he added to the routine of lessons, gave him as a prize the English translation of a book by Figuier--_The World before the Deluge_.”
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: “The day has gone by for downright assaults on science; to be marketable, you must prove that _The Origin of Species_ was approvingly foreseen in the first chapter of Genesis, and that the Apostles' Creed conflicts in no single point with the latest results of biblical criticism.”
Bridgewater Treatise by William Buckland: “Among the books which he induced her to read were Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise and the works of Hugh Miller.”
A Monograph of the British Fossil Brachiopoda by Thomas Davidson: “Those publications of the Palaeontological Society, one volume of which (a part of Davidson's superb work on the _Brachiopoda_) even now lay open within sight”