"Domestic fiction" is a term used to describe a body of popular narrative literature written by, for, and about women that flourished during the mid-nineteenth century. Also called "woman's fiction" by the critic Nina Baym, who was one of the first scholars to study the genre in great detail, this literature focuses on the daily domestic lives of young, mostly middle-class white girls as they grow into womanhood. The plots of domestic fiction deliver didactic life lessons that members of the dominant culture considered useful in preparing nineteenth-century female readers for their lives as adult women. The life lessons conveyed in this fiction mirror the Protestant Christian values of the time and usually subscribe to what Barbara Welter has termed "the cult of True Womanhood," a nineteenth-century cultural ideal of femininity that upheld the four virtues of purity, piety, domesticity, and submission.