250 years ago a baby girl was born in a country rectory in southern England. She was the seventh child for her parents George and Cassandra within ten years. She was baptised privately in her father’s church within a day – in those times of high infant mortality and dread of dying unbaptised, a wise precaution – and given the name ‘Jane’. This was decades before reform of the registration of births, marriages and deaths: Jane’s baptismal name, entered into the Register of Baptisms of Steventon, was her legal name. She grew up attending church regularly, observing her father go diligently about his ministry, joining in family prayers and saying her prayers at night, and in all other respects proving a lively and intelligent but also serious-minded young Christian woman. She remained an active churchgoer all her life, mingled with country clergy, and as an adult even wrote her own prayers, a few of which survive amongst the small portion of papers and letters spared by her older sister Cassandra after her death in 1817.
Jane Austen’s Christian life was completely unremarkable. It is hard to say it was typical of her class and gender – she was, after all, a very remarkable woman. But she was in earnest about her beliefs and moral values. She never gave any sign that she did not take her faith seriously, or that she despised or rejected the church of her birth, the Church of England. She is appropriately commemorated in the churchyard at Chawton, where she lived for the last eight years of her life, and buried in Winchester Cathedral. She was devoted to her father, who was unquestionably a hard-working, faithful minister of the Gospel, a clergyman who was unaffected by the growing tide of Evangelical sentiment, but was also not closely identified with the traditional ‘High Church’ party out of which, two or three generations later, a more intense and emotional sacramental piety was to come, Tractarianism. Rather, he was influenced by moderate Enlightenment ideas of ‘rational’ piety – undemonstrative, serious, ethically and liturgically conservative, not intensely sacramental, attentive above all to reading and preaching the Word of God. He was comfortably off, but not rich, and like many clergymen of the period, he supplemented his relatively modest income, derived from endowment, fees and tithe, with private teaching and with cultivating the produce of the ‘glebe’, farming land attached to a living. His life and ministry were of a piece with the experience of other country clergy of the eighteenth century. I wrote about them in A People’s Church. A History of the Church of England (2022); I could have used George Austen as an example.
We do not think of Jane Austen as a ‘religious novelist’. She was not, for example, like the Victorian novelist Charlotte Yonge, who was profoundly influenced by John Keble and who used her novels to explore doctrinal themes and religious dilemmas. And I won’t be making the case here. Jane rarely touched explicitly on matters of faith. One partial exception is in Mansfield Park, where the heroine, Fanny, regrets the loss of family prayers in great houses: “It was a valuable part of former times”, she says: “There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one’s ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer, is fine!” This could be read simply as a kind of aesthetic approval of a formerly established practice now disappearing, but it seems likely it was more than that, and reflected Jane’s instinct that the habit of daily prayer, as she knew it, was no less relevant for the houses of the gentry and nobility than it was for those of the clergy.
Her novels are steeped in the social world in which she moved, and in which local society was completely entangled with, and involved in, the ministry of the Church of England. But you get the sense she largely takes that for granted. It is of course personal drama, the intersecting lives and loves of young women in particular about which she writes. Like the Napoleonic wars, the operation of the political system of her time, the agrarian and even industrial revolutions occurring around her, the life of the Church of England is not in the foreground of her work – it is simply an unavoidable aspect of the social and moral landscape for her, sometimes even just a shadow in the background. One could make much the same point about the writing of the Brontës, incidentally. Yes, there are plenty of clergy in Jane’s novels, and many of them – the egregious Mr Collins the standout example of course – are there to be satirised, but I don’t think the satire reflects a broader assault by Jane on the Church itself. Rather, I think it’s the other way round – she could satirise clerical shortcomings precisely because she valued the role and vocation of the clergy so highly and knew they often fell short.
In another sense, though, her novels are deeply moral and, without being didactic and narrow, they do expose their characters to a sort of process of moral education, by which their prejudices are exposed, their pride curtailed, their manipulation of people discomfited, their aspirations purged and made realistic. Kindness is celebrated, arrogance and cruelty criticised. The moral framework of Jane Austen’s novels is deeply, irretrievably, unavoidably Christian. It is, in a subdued and subtle way, the morality of the Sermon on the Mount. And she is not afraid to take a firm moral standpoint. She is ‘judgey’, in a manner that is extremely unfashionable today. F.R. Leavis had a point when he placed her in his ‘great tradition’ of English novelists writing out of strong moral convictions, whatever you think of his argument overall.
In saying all this, of course, I’m not saying anything new. The late Irene Collins, historian and Austen specialist, wrote two detailed, authoritative books on this – Jane Austen and the Clergy (1994) and Jane Austen. The Parson’s Daughter (1998). And yet the religious background and identity of Austen’s work is almost completely ignored today. In the current round of celebrations of her birth, almost nothing has been said about her religious identity. The much-praised BBC series Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius was lamentably thin on her religious and intellectual formation and her moral values, instead – inevitably – casting her in a counter-cultural mould as someone who ‘ripped up the rulebook’. Really? Lucy Worsley’s programme on the making of Jane Austen likewise said little about her faith. Other popular biographies likewise have a great black where this absolutely fundamental aspect of her life ought to be.
What is going on here? Religion – and particularly Christianity in its conventional Anglican form – is such an embarrassment now in mainstream media that it’s best simply ignored. A process of cultural aphasia has been going on for years, by which central elements of British culture and history which were steeped in Christianity are set to one side, or treated at best as a peripheral eccentricity, at worst as an ideology of oppression. Really, it is impossible to understand British history and culture, including the lives and work of the vast majority of novelists, dramatists and poets writing in English before the second half of the twentieth century, without taking into account the completely normal, largely accepted and yet internally complex and contested fact of religion.
But if we put back the religion into our reading of Jane Austen, or at least, recognise its presence ‘in the wings’ of her works as well as its embeddedness in the moral outlook of her characters and narratives, could we risk calling her works Anglican classics? The term ‘classic’ is of course highly contested. It’s a term with unstable content. Leavis might have tried to fix the dramatis personae of his English tradition, but it’s widely recognised now that he thought in much too narrow and dogmatic a way. We have been re-evaluating long neglected artists and writers in recent decades. We recognise a greater fluidity, and a greater richness and diversity, in the writing we might want to deem in some sense ‘classic’. Even apparently well-established writers go in and out of fashion. Who now takes much notice of that supposedly gendered term ‘man of letters’? Who reads Carlyle, Johnson, Ruskin today, to mention a mere handful? ‘Writing’ in popular jargon has been constricted more and more to fiction. Personally I’d be very happy to deploy the term ‘woman of letters’ – how else might we describe Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle, for example?
But of course, even granting the contested nature of the term ‘classic’, probably no one is going to dispute that Jane Austen’s works are classics. But are they Anglican classics? As I’ve said, you can hardly claim that they are explicitly and directly religious works in a way true of some other writers. I think we can be pretty sure that she didn’t see her novels as didactic or as Anglican apologetic. She was Anglican in upbringing and religious practice, she never seems to have questioned her Anglican identity, she wrote about Anglican clergy (I’m struggling to remember any Nonconformist or Catholic figures in her novels). More to the point, as I’ve indicated, the moral framework within which she writes is of a piece with a certain kind of practical Anglican piety, the piety perhaps of William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), published just a few years before her father’s birth, or the much earlier Whole Duty of Man (1658), probably by Richard Allestree but popular throughout the late seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That is a morality modest and practical, serious, attentive to the needs of others, careful about its own motivations, and seeking virtue without fuss and showiness. These books and others were read not jut by clergy, but by ordinary, literate people. They were hugely influential, just as Bunyan, Milton and Shakespeare were, of course.
Even so, I’m still reluctant to pin the word ‘Anglican’ so directly to Jane Austen’s writing. I think she would probably have recoiled from something so explicit as a description of her work. And there might be a risk of implying a kind of narrowness that most of her modern readers wouldn’t readily accept. All the same, whether you’re a Christian or not, it’s difficult seriously to argue that you can ignore the fact that Jane was a person of faith and pretend that her whole mental and intellectual makeup can be understood without recognising that. But that’s the problem with the eviscerated version of our past we’re now expected to accept, and which is blandly transmitted by the mainstream media. We don’t want to face up to the religious identity and complexity of our past. It’s easier not to think about it at all, or to pretend, like a sort of crude Feuerbachian analysis, that when people in the past talked about religion they really meant something else – community, hierarchy, oppression, whatever. To paraphrase E.P. Thompson, we’re happy to look at people in the past with the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ (incidentally Thompson himself was not above that). So, when come to think about Jane Austen, we want her to be like we want to be – we want her to be lively, witty, subversive, but – please God! – not religious.
Ad fontes 