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Chapters
Jane Austen and the Church
The Story of the Church in England
Christianity and Culture, University of York
(2010)
Jane Austen was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Her six novels critique the faults of human beings and flaws in human institutions. She conducts this critique as a devout believer in mainstream Anglican teaching, as she sees it reflected in human relationships, and in the natural world. She has a particular relationship with the Enlightenment, through British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. As there was still an organic relationship between Church and State in her period, it is impossible to separate her social commentaries into distinct religious and secular spheres without misrepresenting them. This chapter discusses the sacramental nature of Austen's Anglicanism, the religious aspects of her novels, how she portrays her clerical characters, and how the scriptures are encoded within her work.
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Jane Austen and the Bible
The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature
Wiley-Blackwell
(2009)
Austen's novels participate in the intellectual ferment of her period and situate themselves in relation to contemporary genres of heroine-centred novels. They are simultaneously biblical and contemporary; they present the story of the fall and the drama of salvation in contemporary terms; they interrogate neoclassicism and romanticism in biblical terms. Each novel focuses on marriage and the family, where the condition of the domestic economy mirrors the national economy, both of which are measured against the divine economy. This chapter shows how her narrative scheme appears in three novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park.
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