Please note that due to software used, not everything in this transcript will be accurate

Jane Austen

Reading

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. “My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

John Dickson – Studio:

Well, given this is an episode on Jane Austen, I’m sure you knew we’d have to include that quote sooner or later – best to get it out of the way early. It is, of course, the opening lines to her novel, Pride and Prejudice, and arguably one of the best known openings in all of English literature — right alongside Charles Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …” and so on!  Anyway, Jane Austen’s words and books are well known. But what do we know of Jane herself–what she was like, what she believed? It’s a question that came to the fore in 2017. There was a bit of controversy when the Bank of England released a new ten-pound note featuring Jane Austen to mark the 200th anniversary of her death. The portrait the bank used was an 1870 adaption of sketch made by Jane’s sister Cassandra some 60 years earlier. The adaption ‘prettified’ Jane, made her a genteel lady of the manor type figure. Jane Austen purists made their views known. There was a quote on the bank note: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading.” Again, purists complained that it could seem like a quote from Jane Austen herself, when in fact it was the Pride and Prejudice character Miss Bingley as she tossed her book aside. And the stately home placed behind Jane in the bank note was never hers. It was her brother’s, Godmersham Park. The poor Bank of England had to produce an explainer video to calm the controversy down.

Media – Bank of England official response

John Dickson – Studio:

In some ways, I like the controversy. I like both sides, I mean. I love Jane Austen. I picture her as smart, funny, stylish, elegant, maybe even a bit posh. I’ve idealised her. But I also want to get to the bottom of who she really was, and, in particular, what she thought about … society and class, ethics (like the slave trade of her time), literature, romance … and faith! At times in her novels, Christianity — or the Church at least — doesn’t come off looking so good! So, was Jane a bit of a sceptic or did she see herself as a critic from the inside. I want to be undeceived about this remarkable novelist. And I’m hoping it doesn’t mean I’ll fall slightly out of love with her. We’ll see. I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson – Studio:

My first guest is an academic, author and speaker who works at the juncture of modern culture and timeless English literature. Dr Karen Swallow Prior is the 2025-26 Karlson Scholar at Bethel Seminary. She is a professor with a particular focus on British literature, and has written seven books with contributions to numerous others. The creative works that catch our eye for this episode are her book, Sense and Sensibility: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting, and her podcast, Jane and Jesus. 

 

John Dickson:
If all we knew of Jane Austen were her novels, um, I think I might have assumed  she was a very posh, educated socialite in England. Um, is that true or what do we know about her background?

 Karen Swallow Prior:
Well, that, that would be a good assumption to make because she certainly writes about the gentry and the sort of what we might call the upper middle class equivalent of our day. And she was a keen observer of humankind, so she obviously had time and luxury to make those observations and to write those things down. But the fact is that she was the daughter of a clergyman, um, a very devout clergyman in fact, and was herself a devout Anglican. And, uh, she did have. Because of that, the time and capacity and education to write. Um, but interestingly enough, one of my favorite, uh, most favorite anecdotes about her is that when she would sit in the drawing room and write on her little table, she would hide her paper if someone walked into the room. And so it was seemingly not quite something proper to do in front of company to write.

John Dickson:
Oh, isn’t that interesting? You mentioned clergy. Um, so clergy appear in her novels and they’re not always awesome, Karen. Um, so,

 Karen Swallow Prior:
Just like real life, right?

 John Dickson:
Yeah. Um, what, what was the role of clergy in her life? You mentioned her dad. Uh, what, what effect did he have on her?

Karen Swallow Prior:
Well, more generally, I think it’s important to understand that the clergy in 19th century Georgian, England were essentially. Uh, officers of the government in a sense, because there was, and still is a state church, and it was often just assumed and presumed that the. Second, born in the family, the firstborn would inherit the wealth and the land. And the second born would go to university to become, uh, ordained as a clergyman. And so it was a role that many, um, took just because it was expected of them. So that didn’t mean that they felt necessarily a personal call to ministry, um, or. A love for the pastoral role, but of course some did. And so, and Jane Austin’s father was someone who, by all accounts, did serve faithfully and well, and yet she was surrounded by those who just fulfilled the role in ministry because that’s what they were supposed to do. And it was a good gig if you could get it.

John Dickson:
Yeah. So were, um, were clergy and, uh, was Jane’s household, uh, wealthy because. Of this? Um, or, or was she dependent on others throughout her life?

Karen Swallow Prior:
Yeah. No, no. Most clergy men were not wealthy. And, uh, and Jane’s family wa was not wealthy. And so, uh, she even had to have the support of her older brothers financially throughout her life. And they did live in a couple of of different places. And so we see that anxiety leaking through in really all of her novels in one form or another. This anxiety that the, uh, that the, again, I’m, I’m using the term sort of upper middle class because it translates to our time. It was a reality for anyone in that class who didn’t own property, didn’t own a home, but for women especially, it was a very fragile place to be because women depended on either their fathers or their brothers or their future husbands to provide a home and financial security for them, which is why we see so many of the, or almost nearly all of the female characters in Austin’s novel, uh, novel, struggling with their financial futures.

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s part of the struggle of coming to terms with the real Jane Austen—grasping what her life was really like. After her death, her family were eager to present a sister and aunt who was entirely agreeable. In the Biographical Notice of 1818, her brother Henry wrote: “She was thoroughly religious and devout; her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church.” He also assured readers: “In her temper she was cheerful and not easily irritated, and though rather reserved to strangers, in her own family and among her intimate friends, she was animated and joyous.” ‘Cheerful and not easily irritated’ maybe  … but her surviving letters also reveal a woman who could wield her wit like a razor. In his Memoir of Jane Austen (1870), Jane’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh offered the picture of a quiet homebody: “Her life was not distinguished by adventures or events. She lived quietly at home, and her pleasures and occupations were those of domestic life.” It seems the family did not want Jane to be remembered as a fiercely dedicated novelist.

 John Dickson:
Was it all effortless? Do we have any idea of. How laborious this was for her.

Karen Swallow Prior:
Yeah, I, well, we have a little bit of an indication. I mean, she, she was raised in a very literary family, and so she, they would read novels together, um, in the evenings, in the, in the, in their, their home in the parsonage. And this was a time when novels were actually sort of scandalous and not very classy.

John Dickson – Studio:

Jane Austen actually had a very high view of the novel as an art form, despite the feelings of her time. In Northanger Abbey, she even breaks out into the first person to defend the art form she devoted herself to … and historians come in for a bit of a bagging.

Reading – Northanger Abbey

Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Jane Austen – Northanger Abbey 

John Dickson – Studio:

On a personal note, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was one of a small collection of novels that broke me out of the very attitude she was critiquing here. I was the historian who thought – rarely said but often thought – ‘Why would you read fiction when there is so much fascinating real world to read?’ It was my mate Simon Smart—my colleague at the Centre for Public Christianity at the time (he’s now the boss there)—who convinced me I should read novels. He wrote a list of great works and started me off with a gift of a special edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. Next on the list was Jane Austen. I was in love, not just with Harper Lee and Jane Austen, but with this fiction thing! I can’t say I read a lot of novels — I mean, there are so many fascinating real-world things to read (!) — but at least I now know what I’m missing!

Karen Swallow Prior:
So they were progressive in that, in that sense that they would enjoy, uh, novels and other literary works. And we know from her writing her juvenalia that she started writing at a very young age. Um, and I think, I think the best record we have of her labor is just reading her works in order, in seeing how she developed and grew. We can see, for example, if we read Sense and Sensibility, which is, um, her first published novel. It’s one of my favorites, but it’s, it’s definitely a little bit rougher and a little bit more outrageous in some ways, and it’s comedy. And then we moved toward her later novels, such as Persuasion and Mansfield Park. And she’s still writing satire, she’s still being critical, but it’s softer and gentler and much more nuanced. And her heroines are more mature as well. And so we can almost track the progress of her writing by reading her works in order.

John Dickson – Studio:

So, according to Karen, the best order to read Austen in is as follows… Start with Sense and Sensibility, then Pride and Prejudice (Producer Kaley’s favourite), move on to Northanger Abbey, then Mansfield Park, and Emma (Director Mark’s favourite), and finally Persuasion. Austen published her six novels in just a seven-year window — suggesting an explosion of creativity. But it turns out she worked tirelessly on these, polishing and repolishing, for more than two decades. As I said to my children as they grew up, the key to good writing is rewriting! (They’ll groan if they’re listening).

Reading

‘What shall I do?’ [asked Harriet] ‘What would you advise me to do? Pray, dear Miss Woodhouse, tell me what I ought to do?’ ‘I shall not give you any advice, Harriet. I will have nothing to do with it. This is a point which you must settle with your own feelings. ‘I had no notion that he liked me so very much,’ said Harriet, contemplating the letter. For a little while Emma persevered in her silence; but beginning to apprehend the bewitching flattery of that letter might be too powerful, she thought it best to say, ‘I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. If she can hesitate as to ”Yes,” she ought to say ”No” directly. It is not a state to be safely entered into with doubtful feelings, with half a heart. I thought it my duty as a friend, and older than yourself, to say this much to you. But do not imagine that I want to influence you.’ ‘Oh! no, I am sure you are a great deal too kind to — but if you would just advise me what I had best do — No, no, I do not mean that — As you say, one’s mind ought to be quite made up — One should not be hesitating — It is a very serious thing. It will be safer to say ‘No’, perhaps. Do you think I had better say ‘No?’?’ ‘Not for the world,’ said Emma, smiling graciously, ‘would I advise you either way. You must be the best judge of your own happiness. If you prefer Mr. Martin to every other person; if you think him the most agreeable man you have ever been in company with, why should you hesitate? You blush, Harriet. Does any body else occur to you at this moment under such a definition? Harriet, Harriet, do not deceive yourself; do not be run away with by gratitude and compassion. At this moment whom are you thinking of?’ Jane Austen – Emma

John Dickson:
Her heroines are awesome. I mean, um, so articulate. So witty, so insightful to the human condition. I think I’ve always wanted to know, am I getting to know Jane in those best female characters?

Karen Swallow Prior:
That is an excellent question. I think that we are getting to know Jane through really all of her characters because her brilliance is her ability to empathize, her ability to see through different characters’ eyes. In fact, if I can get a little bit nerdy on you here, I would love to just talk briefly about the sort of literary term that describes this. She uses a form of narration called free and direct discourse and in free and direct discourse. she’s actually switching sort of the points of view of different characters as she narrates. And so that famous opening line in Pride and Prejudice about, you know, a single man with a fortune must be in want of a wife that’s actually not what Jane Austen’s point of view would be, or even Elizabeth Bennett, it’s Mrs. Bennett’s point of view, but Jane clearly understands the point of view, the perspective, the anxiety of a mother who has all these daughters that she and her husband are responsible to marry off at some point. And so Austin herself is making a little bit of fun of that perspective. She makes a lot of fun throughout her novels, but she also, she actually has to be able to recognize it and understand it and empathize it in order to present it so well. So I think we can see through all of her portrayals of these various characters, a woman who was witty and intelligent and mocking and satirical, but also sympathetic as well, because she mocks in love, which is really the essence of, of satire, which is what she writes.

John Dickson:
Yeah. Okay. So you’ve mentioned one literary technique. Um, uh, what are some other, uh, literary techniques or approaches that are striking to you in the novels?

Karen Swallow Prior: Y
Yeah, this is a really important one. It is, it is the fact that what Austin is writing is satire. It’s satire in the category of the novel of manners, and so she is mocking the manners of a very sort of stratified and rules-based society, and you can really only mock a rules-based society if you have a society that’s pretty conservative and rigid. So that’s the one that she lived in and that’s the one that she’s pushing against, but an important understanding of satire is that it mocks vice or folly, or both with the purpose of correction. So it’s not just farce. It’s not just mockery for mockery sake. She’s actually trying to correct sort of the foibles and excesses of her society, and so she’s not just writing love stories, she’s not just writing romances, she’s just not, not just writing about marriage, although all those things are there. She’s actually writing about the entirety of her society, which happens to have these arbitrary and traditional rules about women’s place and about marriage and economics and finances and politics and who, who gets to vote and who doesn’t, all of those things. But she is, um, she is wanting to correct some of the errors, but in a very conservative and highly Christian way. She’s rooted in her traditions and yet she sees some of the errors and wants to illuminate them.

John Dickson:
Yeah. And even Elizabeth Bennett, who’s, you know, the most compelling character in that novel. I mean, to my mind, I mean, it’s who I want Jane to be anyway. We love, uh, Bennett. We, we track with her all the way, but even she ends up being wrong. That’s, that’s incredibly sophisticated storytelling to my mind.

Karen Swallow Prior:
That’s actually the, almost the entire point of Pride and Prejudice, and it’s so significant, important and important and, and something that the film adaptations often either don’t include at all or minimize, and really the, the highlight of the whole novel, the turning point is that point when Elizabeth reads the letter from Mr. Darcy and recognizes all of the errors in judgment that she has made, and she says to herself that she has not even known herself. 

Reading – Pride and Prejudice

As proud and repulsive as were Mr Darcy’s manners, Elizabeth had never, in the whole course of their acquaintance — an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways — seen anything that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust — anything that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits: that among his own connexions he was esteemed and valued — that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his sister as to prove him capable of some amiable feeling; that had his actions been what Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of everything right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and that friendship between a person capable of it, and such an amiable man as Mr. Bingley, was incomprehensible. She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. “How despicably I have acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable distrust. How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either was concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Karen Swallow Prior:
And what she means by that is that she, spoiler alert, or anyone who hasn’t read it, but what she means by that is that she thought too highly of her own perception, her own interpretation, her own ability to, to figure out everything that’s going on with the people that are in her life. And that moment of realizing that she got so much wrong and therefore needs to correct herself, not just all of the, you know, the other things she’s satirizing in her narration. The fact that she realizes she was wrong and she needs to correct herself, that is a moment of revelation and growth and redemption and everything in the novel turns, uh, in a different direction at that point.

John Dickson – Studio:

Any doubts about Jane Austen’s place in English literature evaporated in the century following her death. Within 50 years she had become admired by major literary figures like Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, and George Henry Lewes. During the First World War, Herbert Brett-Smith, an Oxford don charged with recommending suitable reading for recuperating soldiers, prescribed Austen for her soothing effects. I can see that. During the Second World War, when Winston Churchill was laid low with pneumonia, he asked for Pride and Prejudice to be read aloud to him. What he loved was that, while Austen actually wrote during the tumultuous European revolutions and the wars of Napoleon, she maintained her focus on people, personalities, and ethics. He wrote that he sensed no trace of, “… the crashing struggles of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could.” I don’t mean to imply that Austen is just good therapy. She deserves a little more credit than that!

John Dickson:
Where do you place her in the British literary Pantheon? I mean some people have said that, you know, she’s like a Shakespeare, like she’s up there. Would you go that far?

Karen Swallow Prior:
That’s a great question. All right, so, so Shakespeare obviously was a man who had access to even greater literary education and resources hundreds of years before Jane Austen than she would have. And so Shakespeare is a great in the English language and in English literature, and I think that what Jane Austin does is build on Shakespeare, obviously, and the tradition of 18th century writers, including the early novelists and the satirists. If Shakespeare built a giant China cabinet, Austin creates sets of China and teacups and plates that can be placed inside the cabinet because Shakespeare built out the English language, created vocabulary and words and great stories of epic proportion, and Austin is able to take that foundation and make finer, more nuanced, more delicate and more insightful in some ways and narrower perspectives that help us to see even more into the depth of a particular time and place that was her own, and also gives us insights into our own.

John Dickson – Studio:

Jane had at least one proposal of marriage we know of – which she accepted for all of about 24 hours! She never ended up marrying. But couples appear throughout her stories. The romantic tensions between Elinor Dashwood & Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility. The slow-blooming relationship between Miss Woodhouse and Mr Knightly in Emma. And, of course, the long twisting road to the altar for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. So, was she the mother of the modern romance novel? Stay with us.

Media – Sense and Sensibility

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s Ang Lee’s 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, featuring Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars. And that incoherent sobbing? Well, that’s the incomparable Emma Thompson, though probably not at her best. Jane-ites have a love-hate relationship with the film, as you’d expect, but it won an Oscar for best script despite having only seven of Austen’s original lines (which is a sort of blasphemy in the Austen world). Hugh and Emma have been joined by a constellation of stars who’ve played Austen’s characters – Greer Garson, Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Winslet – just to name a few. There are more than 40 period dramas for film and television based on her novels. And that doesn’t include the 30 or so modern genre mashups, like Director Mark’s favourite, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. True story. People think I make this stuff up about Director Mark, but he’s really the guy (there are about 4 of them in the world) who loves Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! 

John Dickson:
People who have maybe seen the movies, uh, the, the Austin novels turned into productions might think of her really as the mother of Modern romance novels. Um, so, uh, to what degree is that true? Uh, versus she was actually a profound social critic, which doesn’t always come through in the depictions.

Karen Swallow Prior:
You know, the films are a little bit of a pet peeve of mine. I’ve watched some of them and some adaptations are better than others, and yet it’s almost impossible to really capture what she’s doing in the novels and translate it to the screen. This, it can be done. But too often what the film producers are trying to do is to create a story that’s just about romance and love and, and causes its viewers to swoon and, you know, and to look for the next Mr. Darcy. Austen was not only a brilliant social critic, but she was also a virtue ethicist. Alistair McIntyre and his wonderful work After Virtue describes and, uh, Austin in exactly this way in, in very, uh, profound philosophical and theological terms. 

 John Dickson:
She’s a, she’s the last of the virtue ethicist, right?

 Karen Swallow Prior:
Because she is one of the last in sort of the of, of late modernity.

John Dickson – Studio:

Just a quick note to say that Alasdair MacIntyre was a Scottish-American philosopher who died earlier this year. He’s particularly remembered for his book After Virtue, because in it he describes how we are living in a society that has the language and appearance of morality, but doesn’t really understand the context for it anymore. When it came to the history of virtue, MacIntyre reflected on what friend of the pod CS Lewis had to say about Jane Austen:

“Lewis saw in her an essentially Christian writer. It is her uniting of Christian and Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Austen the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues which I have tried to identify.”

Karen Swallow Prior:
Be because she is one of the last in sort of the of, of late modernity. And so. Much of that gets missed in the film simply because it can’t really be translated. That free and direct discourse that I talked about before is difficult to translate. The satire and the comedy is difficult to translate without it becoming almost farcical or slapstick. And so the films make great stories, but they really aren’t the same stories that Austin is telling in her novels.

John Dickson:
This is a really, um, profound point about Austin, that the, the virtue ethics. So can we just hover there for a little bit? What exactly do you mean? ’cause not, not everyone will track with that. And where do you see this shining through most in her novels?

Karen Swallow Prior:
So Virtue ethics is a field of philosophy and ethics that talks about the character traits that we can develop over time through practice and habit to become, you know, essentially good people. That doesn’t come naturally to most of us, perhaps not to any of us. And so virtue are kind of virtue consists of the excellencies that human nature is capable of. But again, it can be difficult to achieve because of our, you know, our fallen human nature. And so virtue actually exists and is developed in the context of, of our own lives and times and places which are changing and offer different challenges for us depending on what obstacle or dilemma we’re facing.

 John Dickson:
And it would be in contrast to sort of a rules based morality, right?

Karen Swallow Prior:
Yeah, so, so a rules-based morality is going to say, this is what you should always do in order to have this particular outcome. Uh, and there’s obviously a place for rules. The 10 commandments are, are rules that we follow and we should not trespass in order to live in a just world and to be just people. And yet oftentimes, uh, there, there are lots of other, um, situations and dilemmas that we face where we have to decide what does it mean to be courageous in this situation? What does it mean to be, to have integrity, to be diligent? And those circumstances vary and call upon in us different exertions of those virtues and the problem that we have in our late modern and postmodern culture, as Alasdair McIntyre and other philosophers point out, is that we have become so subjective and so rooted in our own emotivism, or just, you know, sort of our emotional understanding of the world that what, what I decide is right, is what feels right, rather than what is based on some objective morality that we can talk about virtue, and not even be talking about the same thing – everything is so subjective. Austen was living right at the time period when that sort of more objective world that measures things like right and wrong against absolute transcendent eternal truths was shifting into this more subjective, emotional world, in which we don’t believe in those things so we have to determine them for ourselves. And what Austen does in her novels is she presents characters in situations that are very emotional, very hard for her characters and hard for us if we were in those situations today, which is why they make great films, and yet she is calling on her characters to develop and exercise virtue rather than rely simply on their own subjective emotion or even their own individual perspective, which is of course, what Elizabeth does initially until she realizes that her own perspective and her own judgment aren’t quite as reliable against objective reality as she thought they were. And so she corrects and becomes more virtuous.

 John Dickson:
And she doesn’t think of it as, uh, a simple error of judgment. The way she describes it is this is a profound through line that she got wrong.

Karen Swallow Prior:
Exactly. She realizes that, that the error of judgment came because she didn’t know herself well enough to know the limitations of her judgment, her perspective, her perception, and all of those things, which is really true of all of us.

John Dickson – Studio:

CS Lewis points out that Jane’s characters regularly go through this change in self-perception … what he calls an undeception. In 1954, he wrote a series of critical essays, and in one of them — titled ‘A Note on Jane Austen’ — he showed how four of Austen’s heroines, from four different novels, all go through the process of being undeceived. Those are his words ‘undeceived’ and ‘undeception’–used at least six times in the essay, the first of which is: 

“We shall have to call it ‘undeception’ or ‘awakening’. All four heroines painfully, though with varying degrees of pain, discover that they have been making mistakes both about themselves and about the world in which they live. All their data have to be reinterpreted … It is perhaps worth emphasizing what may be called the hardness – at least the firmness – of Jane Austen’s thought exhibited in all these undeceptions.”

Boom!  Yes, we pinched our show title from CS Lewis! But how did Jane Austen ‘undeceive’ people about religion. I once thought Jane was a critic of Christianity. Some of her portrayals of the church and clergy made me wince.  So what were her views of the higher things? Stick with us.

Media – Pride and Prejudice

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s the 1995 BBC mini-series, Pride and Prejudice, and the obsequious clergyman, Mr Collins, played by David Bamber. This is my favourite Austen screen portrayal. Many agree. The series came in at number three in Time Magazine’s “Best of Television” list for 1996. In it, we see Mr Collins pretty constantly mocked by the other characters. And viewers can’t help but mock along! Then again, her hero of Mansfield Park, Edmund Bertram, can think of nothing better than joining the clergy. So what’s going on there? My next guest says it’s important to understand Jane’s context and what she is actually taking aim at with the presentation of Mr Collins. The Reverend Paula Hollingsworth is the chaplain at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and the author of The Spirituality of Jane Austen. 

Paula Hollingsworth:
So some people say, oh, Christian Faith and Jane Austen, how can that be given that we have Mr. Collins? Mm-hmm. But what I want to say to people is, where do we see Mr. Collins She doesn’t mock him in church. She doesn’t show him in church. Obviously he leads services or whatever. She mocks him in his social role, particularly in his obsequious behavior. uh, to Lady Catherine DeBerg. That’s where she mocks him. She doesn’t mock his faith. Jane Austin’s mother wrote that of all of her daughter’s characters, her favorite was Mr. Collins. Now, Mrs. Austin was the wife of a clergyman. She was the mother of clergyman. She was the daughter of clergyman. If anybody was going to find Mr. Collins offensive, it would be Mrs. Austin. So I think that’s indicative of, of actually Jane isn’t mocking or ridiculing him as a clergyman, but because of the deficiencies in his character. In Pride and Prejudice Mr. Collins is very much mocked, um, for his, uh, for his social role but he’s taken much more seriously in Mansfield Park where, uh, one of the significant failures of Mansfield Park is because Dr. Gauntlet, the Vicar in Mansfield Park does not have a moral lead, in the, in, in the estate of Mansfield Park, and I believe that Mansfield Park, in a sense, is a symbol of, of, of, of England. I believe Mansfield Park is  a book that’s written very much about society, and so she’s very critical of Dr. Gly because he does not take the moral lead, which is what she believes the clergy should be doing. In, in his, um, in his parish. Different Christians will express their faith in different ways. So, uh, for some people would describe themselves as contemplative Christians and, uh, that, and, and what’s, what’s most important for them in their practice, you know, will be silent, you know, ongoing prayer. Some people would describe themselves, um, as, as, as, as justice Christians. What matters for the most, um, is social justice. What’s most important, uh, for Jane Austen, this would be true of the church of her childhood, but this I believe I see very clearly, um, in her books is, is what we would describe as, as, as a holiness direction, which is the desire that the Christian faith will impact our lives and our morals. And that that will then have, um, an influence on other people. So in terms of, of the faith, Jane Austen’s faith, I believe is reflected in a spirituality of holiness. And can I read you a definition of that that I find very helpful? This is taken from Streams of Living Water. Um, and, uh, the writer, um, is reflecting on the different traditions of spirituality,  of Christian spirituality…

John Dickson – Studio:

Richard Foster is the author … a Christian theologian from the Quaker tradition – one that’s highly self-reflective and often worships in silence. Foster’s book, Streams of Living Water, examines six dimensions of faith and practice – like individual study and retreat – that have defined Christian tradition around the world.

Paula Hollingsworth:
He says, the holiness stream of Christian life and faith focuses on the inward  reformation of the heart and  the development  of holy habits. We can rely upon those deeply ingrained habits of virtue to  make our lives function appropriately and to bring forth  substantial character formation. This addresses the erosion of moral fiber in contemporary society. And I believe that that very much sums up what the book of Mansfield Park in particular is about. ] At the end of Mansfield Park, you have Sir Thomas Bertram reflecting on his daughter’s, um, upbringing. And one of the things that he says as he reflects on Mariah and Julia, something must have been wanting within,  they’d been instructed theoretically in their religion. But never required to bring it into daily practice. So this is all about the importance of bringing your faith into daily practice.

 John Dickson:
Yeah. I mean that holiness paradigm is Yes. I think illuminating because she’s such an advocate for humility versus pride. For reservation instead of sort of the flaunting of riches. Yes, yes. These are profoundly associated with the Christian Holiness tradition.

Paula Hollingsworth:
So that would be, that would be the tradition of the Anglican Church in which Jane Austen grew up.

Karen Swallow Prior:
So Austen is not the first person that you would think of when you think of a Christian author, and I love that about her. She was, again, an Anglican. She was the daughter of a clergyman. She was not. In today’s parlance, or even her own parlance evangelical, in fact, she has in some of her correspondence, the fact that she did, doesn’t like evangelicals, uh, and she doesn’t like some of the popular evangelical writers of her day. And yet, as she later said, she realizes that the evangelicals. Probably have some things right that she needs to accept. But her faith was very sort of typically Anglican and traditional in the sense that her theology and her faith come out of her naturally, not in a forced way. And she’s not trying to evangelize or convert or preach to people in her novels about her Christian faith.  It’s just kind of like with Shakespeare built into her worldview.

John Dickson – Studio:

Jane had some interesting things to say about evangelicals. It’s complicated.  Karen points out that Austen at one point wrote, “I do not like the Evangelicals.” A few years later, after she penned Mansfield Park, she wrote that she was now, “… by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals.” Intrigued? So was I. So I asked both my guests about Jane and evangelicals. If you want to hear their analysis you’ve got to be an Undeceptions Plus subscriber. Plussers, just carry on from here. The rest … well, see you on the other side. Most of Jane’s surviving letters are chatty notes that discuss the events of her day and the opinions she developed of the people around her. Her family decided that many of them were not worth saving for posterity. But there are several surviving personal documents that make it clear just how deep and personal her Christian commitment was. She was, after all, a prayer book girl.

Karen Swallow Prior:
Beyond her novels, she actually, we have, uh, left, um, we don’t know, you know what other writings we might, she might have done that we don’t have left, but she wrote three prayers that are rooted in and drawn from the book of Common Prayer and from the Bible, and they’re beautiful, eloquent, devout. Prayers, uh, that reflect very explicitly her strong Christian faith and her reliance on Christ and, um, her belief in, in the church.

Reading 

Give us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray, as to deserve to be heard, to address thee with our hearts, as with our lips. Thou art every where present, from thee no secret can be hid. May the knowledge of this teach us to fix our thoughts on thee, with reverence and devotion that we pray not in vain. Look with mercy on the sins we have this day committed and in mercy make us feel them deeply, that our repentance may be sincere and our resolution steadfast of endeavoring against the commission of such in future. Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of temper and every evil habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own souls. May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent by us, what have been our prevailing thoughts, words, and actions during it, and how far we can acquit ourselves of evil. Have we thought irreverently of thee, have we disobeyed thy commandments, have we neglected any known duty, or willingly given pain to any human being? Incline us to ask our hearts these questions oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by pride or vanity. Give us a thankful sense of the blessings in which we live, of the many comforts of our lot; that we may not deserve to lose them by discontent or indifference…. ‘On Each Return of the Night’ – A prayer by Jane Austen

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s a serious prayer, right there! … We’ll put links to all of her prayers in the show notes.

 John Dickson:
So what do you think are the main, um, moral concerns of Jane Austen taking her body of work?

Paula Hollingsworth:
Alasdsair McIntyre looks at the significance of the virtues and he believes that Jane Austen was the last proponent of the  virtues. And one of the reasons for that is of course, um, is that the virtues, you know, they appear to be about action activity. They’re actually much more about, the role about character And the role that you have in the community. And possibly one of the reasons why Jane  Austen is the last writer is because other writers are, are writing more within the East ethos of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment has a focus on the individual. Whereas the whole thing about virtue is the stress on the community.

John Dickson:
So your your, your response to my question is a, is a good correction of my very question. Yes. ’cause I asked you what are her moral concerns? But actually she, he doesn’t have a moralizing approach. She, she has very clearly a virtue ethic approach. Which  is profoundly New Testament. Profoundly

Paula Hollingsworth:
Profoundly New Testament. I think what a good way to describe virtue, the, you know, how virtues work is the illustration of driving a car. When you learn to drive a car, what’s important is that you learn to drive a car  in all weathers and all road conditions. So a good driver is a good driver when the roads are really good. But they’re also a good driver. When there are slippery leaves, when it’s really windy, when there’s torrential rain, when visibility is bad, because they will know how to correct their driving to fit in with the new circumstances.  So similarly, a virtue isn’t something that’s fixed. It’s about behaving appropriately within limits. Um, in a given situation, so if I can take the example of courage and a house burning down. If you come home and your house is burning down and you think somebody is in it, the courageous thing may be to go in and try and rescue that person. If you come home and your house is burning down and you are assured by your neighbors that nobody is there, the courageous thing to do is just to accept  it. And let that go. So, every virtue will be somewhere between an excess and a deficiency. And I want to suggest that the excess of courage would be recklessness, but the deficiency would be cowardice. So a courageous person will know where to behave on that spectrum, depending on where the circumstances are. And of course Jane Austen named a number of her books after different virtues.

John Dickson – Studio:

Let’s press ‘pause’. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you. The Bible is a literary “classic”, perhaps the literary classic. And like many other works in the literary canon, the Bible can be hard going. It requires thoughtful reading, at a slow pace, preferably with a few footnotes helping us bridge the cultural divide. You might not like it at first, maybe for a hundred pages or more. Eventually, its subtle logic and moral power creeps up on you, and you may even find yourself agreeing with those who say that no one can claim to be an “educated Westerner” until they’ve read the Bible. I had a similar experience in recent years with another work from the Western literary canon. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was one of ten books my literary friends insisted I should read if I wanted to maintain any pretence of being a cultured human being. I swallowed my “I-only-read-non-fiction” pride and sat down one lazy weekend to give it a go. The book opens with that intriguing and unforgettable line, “It was best of times, it was the worst of times …”, but after a couple of pages I was sure I would hate it. The sentence structures were complex, the language unnecessarily verbose (and sometimes even foreign), and the historical setting—London and Paris at the dawn of the French Revolution—was an alien land for me. Fortunately, my edition of A Tale of Two Cities included a lengthy introductory essay from a Dickens scholar and copious footnotes throughout the book explaining unusual terms, cultural peculiarities, and historical references. I dutifully read the notes, all of them. It was a “classic”, after all. It was my intellectual duty. I slowly began to appreciate Dickens’ skill and intent, but even eighty pages in I saw it only as a worthy book, not something to be relished. I can’t say exactly where everything changed—somewhere around page 100 I think – but I distinctly remember putting the book down after a brief installment and wishing I had time to keep going. I was hooked. I had grown fond of the unusual rhythm of the language. I was fascinated by the historical details. And above all, the story captivated me. It is a moving human plot and an insightful portrait of the universal themes of sacrifice and renewal. I felt I had been repaid for my effort, with interest. After reading Dickens, I resolved never again to mock a “classic”—without first reading it, slowly, and in its entirety. I am glad my literary mates like Simon Smart were patient with me through my dogmatic non-fiction years. At times, I must have sounded to them like the 15-year-old in English class: “Shakespeare is stupid!” Some people approach the Bible like this. They’ve never read it—at least not slowly, as an adult, with some technical assistance. Yet, just like the proverbial 15-year-old, they know it’s stupid. But there are reasons this book has influenced our culture, arguably, more than any other text. There are reasons it continues to sell more copies than any other book, every year. The most important and rewarding literary works often require something from us before we reap the benefits. I guess it’s in the nature of a “timeless work” to seem, at first, less immediately relevant, less temporal. But my experience with Dickens has taught me that the pay-off can be surprising, far exceeding the effort. Every thoughtful adult should read the Bible—at least a hundred pages of it, at least the Psalms and the Gospels, preferably with some interpretive aid close by. Even if it begins out of a sense of cultural and intellectual duty only, that’s reason enough to open a true classic, doubly so in this case. The patient and attentive reader of the Bible will be repaid tenfold. You can press ‘play’ now.

John Dickson – Studio:

One of the criticisms of Jane Austen is that she focused too much on the interior life of virtue and small-scale webs of relationships instead of the great events and problems of her day. The French Revolutions. The wars that followed. And what about Slavery!?

John Dickson:
What do you make of the criticism that’s sort of emerged in recent years of. Um, Jane Austen’s, um, tacit approval of slavery is how it’s sometimes put because this is a period where the slavery debate is at its climax. And she’s virtually silent about it. Um, so I just wanna just throw that ball to you.

Paula Hollingsworth:
She made the decision that she was not going to write about things that she didn’t fully know about. And that’s why principally she, uh, she writes about village communities and families because that’s, that’s the sphere in which she lived. You never in her novels have a conversation between two men at which a woman isn’t present because Jane Austen says, I’ve never been in a context where two men talked and women weren’t present. So I dunno how they do it. So she was careful not to do that. So, um, the one thing that I can say is that I believe it’s not coincidence the names that she gave to people in Mansfield Park, she calls the estate Mansfield Park. Lord Mansfield was the Lord Chief Justice who found against slave owners in two widely reported cases. One was in 1772 and another  in 1781. A very notorious slave trader at the time was called Robert Norris. And of course the big baddie in [00:34:16] Mansfield Park is, is Mrs. Norris. So that’s a very, very strong hint that we get. 

John Dickson:
So where is that criticism coming from? Because I’ve heard people, you know, wanting to cancel Jane Austen.

Paula Hollingsworth:
Because, um. Um, Mansfield Park, um, gets its money from, um, an estate. I think it’s an Antigua, And and at one stage, uh, sir Thomas and Tom, you know, go over there because there’ve been some issues there. One of the characters asks the father about, you know, what does he think about the repeal of the slave trade? And there is a silence. Nobody quite knows how to interpret that silence. Jane’s brother Charles was married to the daughter of an estate owner in the West Indies. Um, Cassandra, her sister’s fiance, um, died on a passage back after a visit to the West Indies. The family is embroiled in slavery as most. Family, you know, you know, families of a certain class and wealth and status. Um, you know, were  in those days, um, and it’s very difficult to unpick it.

John Dickson:
So is there, is there nothing in her letters that indicates her –

Paula Hollingsworth:
No, there isn’t. But she was a great fan of William Wilberforce because there was so much going in the same direction. Let me read you the title of something that William Wilberforce once wrote. “A practical view of the prevailing religious system of professed Christians in the higher and middle classes in this century contrasted with real Christianity”. 

Reading

“Let him then, who would be indeed a Christian, watch over his ways and over his heart with unceasing circumspection. Let him endeavour to learn, both from men and books, particularly from the lives of eminent Christians, what methods have been actually found most effectual for the conquest of every particular vice, and for improvement in every branch of holiness. Thus studying his own character, and observing the most secret workings of his own mind, and of our common nature; the knowledge which he will acquire of the human heart in general, and especially of his own, will be of the highest utility, in enabling him to avoid or to guard against the occasions of evil: and it will also tend, above all things, to the growth of humility, and to the maintenance of that sobriety of spirit and tenderness of conscience, which are eminently characteristic of the true Christian. Let true Christians then, with becoming earnestness, strive in all things to recommend their profession, and to put to silence the vain scoffs of ignorant objectors. Let them boldly assert the cause of Christ in an age when so many, who bear the name of Christians, are ashamed of Him: and let them consider as devolved on Them the important duty of suspending for a while the fall of their country, and, perhaps, of performing a still more extensive service to society at large; not by busy interference in politics, in which it cannot but be confessed there is much uncertainty; but rather by that sure and radical benefit of restoring the influence of Religion, and of raising the standard of morality.” William Wilberforce, Real Christianity

Paula Hollingsworth:
With Real Christianity, William Wilberforce had a real emphasis on trying to encourage people, particularly people who had, um, positions of status and influence and wealth, to really take their Christianity seriously, to live out their Christianity and to be a moral lead. And of course, that’s exactly, you know, where Jane is following. 

John Dickson – Studio:

Jane Austen died in Winchester, England, at her tiny College Street home on 18 July 1817, aged just 41. She had been ill for four months, slowly succumbing to what might have been Addison’s Disease or possibly Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  Not long before her passing, her beloved sister Cassandra asked Jane if she wanted anything. ‘Nothing but death’, Jane replied, quoting the words of Christian from The Pilgrim’s Progress. Her attending doctor would later say that he “…supposed a large blood vessel had given way . . . [and] she may be said to have died suddenly.” But then doctors often said things like that so that a patient’s family could believe their loved one had died unexpectedly, without pain. On the 22nd of July, Cassandra is believed to have drafted an announcement for the Courier newspaper in which Jane was publicly named for the first time as the author of all four novels published at that time. It stressed that she wasn’t ‘just’ a writer, she was also a lady, with manners “ …most gentle; her affections ardent; her candour was not to be surpassed, and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.” In December, her family organised for the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in one bumper edition. Jane left behind no husband or children, but six novels that would change the English literary world. In her lifetime, Jane earned only £650 from her writing – that’s about 75 to 85 thousand US dollars in today’s figures. For 25 years of writing, that’s nothing. Jane is buried in Winchester Cathedral. I visited last time I was there. The memorial stone makes no mention of her writing output. Instead, it praises, “… the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper,” and then – and only then – “the extraordinary endowments of her mind.” 

John Dickson:
What’s the best thing about Jane Austen?

Karen Swallow Prior:
The best thing about Jane Austen is her wit and her insight into lots of different types of people. I love that Austin’s novels are written in literary language because I do love literature, but they’re also often about interpretation and the interpretation of texts. Not just written texts, but human beings as texts and gestures as texts, and dances, as texts, and relationships as texts. We are creatures of interpretation, and we are interpreting all the time, whether we realise it or not, and sometimes we do a better job of it than others. And Austin’s novels are all calling us to be better interpreters of ourselves and other people, and life and God.

 John Dickson:
I love that, Karen. Thank you.

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