Jane Austen's Anglicanism.

Dabundo, Laura

Jane Austen's Anglicanism. By Laura Mooneyham White. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. ISBN 978-1409418634. Pp. xi + 215. $89.95.

Of late, it seems, Jane Austen has become everyone's favorite hobbyhorse. Where before the principal battle lines were drawn over whether or not she was a protofeminist a la Mary Wollstonecraft or a dutiful and subservient daughter of the patriarchy, whether her underlying convictions were conservative or subversive, or even whether she wrote as a member of the eighteenth-century Neoclassical Enlightenment or as a fellow traveler of Romanticism's Wordsworth and Coleridge, now she seems to have climbed in bed with zombies and sea monsters. Where on earth amid all the commotion, to say nothing of all the TV and movie versions, then, is Jane Austen the author to be found? For University of Nebraska Professor Laura Mooneyham White, the resolution to the controversies is simple: Austen is a Christian. Specifically, she argues, "Austen's religious values are imprinted everywhere in the novels. The ordinary behavior of her characters shows their moral and spiritual status, and their ability as free creatures to change and grow into greater Christian maturity, an ability especially vouchsafed her heroines and heroes. The world of her novels is a Christian one in which worldliness competes against traditional orthodoxy and moral precepts. Living in the real world, Austen shows, is the best test of one's Christian values, and the novels rest on this foundation of Christian purpose" (66). The book exquisitely and definitively establishes this position.

Jane Austen's Anglicanism begins with a deep and careful scrutiny of the Georgian Anglican church, its people, its tenets, its practices, and its range and influence, focusing on the eighteenth century and the bases that that period laid for the turn of the eighteenth into the early nineteenth century in which Austen lived. Mooneyham White considers the circumstances of clergy families and locates Austen in one of the two most securely Anglican counties, Hampshire, in all of England at that time (46). Austen, Mooneyham White shows, would most assuredly have attended church weekly, and, as her letters make evident, she would not just have heard sermons but frequently read them, too, and she even had a favorite sermonizer (as the book tells us rather more often, probably, than necessary), Thomas Sherlock, who preached a reasonable, practical, forbearing, charitable faith based on order and reason (12, 30, 48, 66, 116). In accordance with that standard, Mooneyham White shows that Austen would have unquestioningly inherited a belief in the Great Chain of Being in which order and hierarchy demarcate human place and role, upwards, downwards, and sideways. Allied with this concept philosophically and practically is Aquinas' natural law, in which "reason itself, made by God, is the central mode by which we can understand the purpose of the universe" (79), and thus would Christians in Austen's day have understood their abilities and responsibilities in a secure and stable world.

Jane Austen's Anglicanism spends considerable time helpfully elucidating Providence, a central dimension of Christian natural law: "Providence denotes God's creation of the world with its ultimate redemption in view, his sovereignty over history and events, and his continual agency in ordinary people's lives.... Anglican conceptions of Providence, derived both from Augustine and Aquinas on the one hand and from Calvin on the other, focus on God's election of those who choose him freely" (83). This reciprocal but also paradoxical stance of choosing the chooser is of course part of how Anglicanism parts ways with more leftist Protestant flavors and with reactionary Catholicism, and Austen's texts are in some ways exemplary of it. As the critic indicates, "the happy endings for Austen's novels are rarely the result of the heroine's own direct dealings: Providence in the form of the author must intervene" (87). The examples adduced include the socially desirable wedding of Elinor Tilney smoothing the way for her brother to wed the less fortunately situated Catherine Morland; Lucy Steele's machinations dissolving her engagement with Edward Ferrars so that he and Eleanor Dashwood can marry; Darcy's rescuing of Lydia Bennet and his aunt's stymied efforts to control Elizabeth Bennet clearing the path for Darcy and Elizabeth to marry; the revelation of the secret engagement of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax's untangling some of the knots in front of Emma Woodhouse's marrying Mr. Knightley; and, though less directly, Louisa Musgrove's turning her affections from Captain Wentworth to Captain Benwick, which removes her from competition with Anne Elliot for Wentworth (87). Deus ex machina, plot manipulations, coincidences, Providence? In the context of this argument, the providential possibilities offer a persuasive reading.

Mooneyham White also assesses the contributions and tensions Evangelicalism brought to the Anglican Church and religious matters at this time. For instance, she notes Austen's use of the word "earnestness" in three different novels (Emma, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey) in contrast to Oscar Wilde's flippancy toward it later on in the century, illustrating her attentive close reading. Here, the critic avers, earnestness always denotes "moral seriousness" as a devotional counter by the Anglican Church to Evangelical challenges in the 1790s (190), with which Austen would have been much in sympathy.

Appropriately for her subject, Mooneyham White attends to the seminal handbook and manual of the Church, the Book of Common Prayer, as it existed then and how it laid out daily, seasonal, and annual rites and rituals, with which Austen, as close relative and family member of many priests of the church, would have been intimately familiar. The services of the prayer book as Thomas Cranmer its author wrote them are substantially and integrally presented in conjunction with the Bible, though Mooneyham White argues of Austen that, "Unlike almost all of her novel writing contemporaries she refrained from citing Scripture, inserting theological passages, creating Biblical parallels with her plots, or even naming her characters after Biblical figures.... [yet] the basic typological parallel between Christ's passion and the individual's struggle for redemption and happiness marks each of her novels" (36-37). Thus, as the critic notes, Austen would have indubitably expected her characters and her audience to be regular English church attenders, conversant with the practices prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer (59), so that their Christianity can surely be assumed, not even to be questioned until the twentieth century. All this understanding, then, has been lost until now, and this book vitally redeems and restores this rich fabric out of which these novels are so evidently woven and worn.

In all cases, the arguments this book presents are surely grounded on Austen scholarship as well as on philosophical, theological, and ecclesiastical commentary. The result is a deeply informed study that illuminates the writings of Austen and contributes to a growing school of Austen studies linking Irene Collins, Michael Giffin, and others who are recently taking this approach, long overdue, it seems to this reviewer. On one hand, though, such rigorous and scholarly attenuated reading does at times tend to overwhelm the text itself with notations, fortunately foot--rather than endnotes for easier and essential consultation, but virtually legion are the pages in which the footnotes take up a quarter to a third of the available space. But often the metadiscourse of the notes is as commanding as the basic text. One wonders, though, if there might not have been a means to incorporate this supplemental commentary into the text itself.

Readers should be aware that more time and attention seem to be devoted to Austen's background, as the title claims, than to unmediated discussion of the novels, though many comments about the novels are strewn through the religious explanations, and indeed, the subject of Austen's religion is eminently interesting and ultimately points toward the resulting shape of the novels.

The text does offer a chapter directly focused on Austen's language, specifically her wordplay in connection with malice, a characteristic of which, Mooneyham White demonstrates, Austen was much aware and saw as a personal failing, singled out in the three prayers she herself wrote, as indicative of a spiritual lack and needing remediation. Austen's wordplay can be seen as mild, as in some of the names of characters she assigns ("'Marianne Dashwood' pronounced backwards becomes 'would dash and marr[y]'" [140]) to double entendres to the many familiar instances in Emma and elsewhere throughout the novels (140-47) where puns and uses of and games with words themselves are examined. However, this use of language--directed toward and about others--becomes a moral dilemma for Austen, as Mooneyham White argues, something that is attractive and tempting and also something destructive and malign, as Emma learns on Box Hill and with which, it seems, Austen waged a lifelong campaign for a personal amelioration.

Rounding out the religious commentary is a provocative examination of the author as creator of her own world, following the divine example, yet also, therefore, engaging the Evangelical attack on novels as worldly and practically diabolical (161). Comments the critic, "Austen participates in God's creative nature by generating a narrator who has seemed to a wide range of readers a pinnacle of goodness and wisdom" (171); that imagination, properly channeled, could and should lead others to well-practiced Christian lives, as the novels, in the end, treat.

The final chapter, referred to earlier, takes a curious turn by drawing a contrast of Austen's novels with The Importance of Being Earnest, with which, it would seem, they have little in common. However, a shared interest in matchmaking, language manipulation, and some similarly circumstanced characters in play and novels leads the critic to muse how much the nineteenth century lost when its heart turned to Wilde and his agnostic and atheistic contemporaries, and that Wilde himself, just before he died, veered from his nihilism back to the Church (194-95). Thus, the final vision of this study returns to Jane Austen's faith, epitomized by the unified and sanctified presentation at the end of Emma, but I must raise one concern here. Earlier the critic seems to believe that the wedding scene at the novel's end is as beneficent as it is because of the exclusion of the malevolent Mrs. Elton; however, it is this reviewer's understanding that properly conducted Anglican weddings are deemed church services open to all members of the parish, which Mrs. Elton as the wife of the rector certainly would have been, so that her absence would perforce have been owing to her own choice or perhaps to Providence, but not because she was not invited (57).

One other small nit I must pick as reviewer is that, while Mooneyham White is generous with her references to other scholars and to an essay of mine on Jane Austen's prayers that she several times graciously discusses, its facts of publication are absent from the seemingly otherwise commodious Works Cited list.

Nonetheless, this is a worthy resource, not just as an addition to religiously oriented scholarship about Jane Austen or to criticism on Christian applications to literature or about English Christianity in the early nineteenth century, but to the reading undertaken by all students of Jane Austen, of whatever stripe or flavor, whether trying to pigeonhole her as Neoclassical, Romantic, conservative, or radical. Surely, no one can truly read Austen astutely who is not mindful, finally, of her Anglicanism, and this well-crafted, erudite, and fascinating book admirably describes and explains that background and heritage. I am a better student of Austen, now, for having had the chance to study and profit from Jane Austen's Anglicanism and, perhaps, I can be a better Christian for understanding how the works of lane Austen foster that goal.

Laura Dabundo

Kennesaw State University