JANE AUSTEN, COMMUNITY, AND THE CHURCH
Public domain.
The last book I finished before the pandemic began was Emma. I had just seen the 2020 film adaptation, which was then a new release, and decided to revisit the novel for the first time in several years. During the course of that re-read, one line in particular stood out to me: the talkative spinster Miss Bates, with her characteristic earnestness, declares, “I always say, we are quite blessed in our neighbors.”
I have been thinking about this line for the last year and half.
Jane Austen was an Anglican, but when one considers the ranks of the great Anglican novelists, her name comes to mind perhaps less readily than those who wrote a century after her. Unlike C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, she wrote no apologetics, and unlike some of her contemporaries, she did not write explicitly “improving” Christian fiction. (She had little patience for didactic novels, in fact; her dislike of Hannah More’s work is well-documented.) (1) But she was a devout Christian—she wrote prayers for private use, (2) took preparation to receive Communion seriously, (3) and was remembered by her family as a close adherent to the established traditions of the Church of England. Only several years after her death she was referred to by Richard Whately, later Archbishop of Dublin, as “evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced…by her religion not being at all obtrusive.” (4)
Rather than thinking of Austen as an author who just happened to be Anglican, I believe that she ought to be claimed by Anglicans as one of our own as eagerly as we claim Lewis. Her novels are concerned with many of the same questions that concern the Church: How do we live in relationship with each other? What must we do when we fail to meet our obligations to our neighbors? How can we see clearly enough to truly know ourselves? This essay engages primarily with answers to these questions as offered by Pride and Prejudice and Emma, two novels that require their protagonists to examine how they interact with their neighbors in order to fully understand themselves and the people they share their lives with.
Austen once wrote in a letter to her niece Anna that “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” (5) The close communities that Austen focuses her narratives on allow her to explore, on a very intimate scale, how people have to live with each other. Elizabeth Bennet spends most of Pride and Prejudice running into the same people over and over again, even when she travels in the second half of the novel, and nearly every new person who enters her life is connected to someone she already knows. The title character of Emma is even more confined. Emma Woodhouse never leaves the environs of Highbury, and she cannot escape other members of her social circle, even ones she finds unpleasant or annoying. After Mr. Elton’s disastrous proposal, the narrator states that of Emma, Mr. Elton, and Harriet Smith, “Not one of them had the power of removal, or of effecting any material change of society. They must encounter each other, and make the best of it.” (6) This is also true for Elizabeth, even though she does have more power to change her society: when she encounters Mr. Darcy during her stay in Kent, there is a stretch of time where the one place they cannot avoid each other is church. (7)
As I re-read these two novels in preparation for writing this essay, I found myself thinking, over and over, “that’s just what belonging to the Episcopal Church is like.” I once ended up, completely unbeknownst to me, attending the same choral concert at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris as two people I went to church with at home. When I went to various parishes during graduate school I discovered mutual acquaintances all over the place. I have done my fair share of “encountering each other and making the best of it” as relationships with people I shared a parish with became awkward or strained.
If society must be shared, then, what do its members owe each other? Austen is occasionally concerned with material obligations—well-off Emma is shown providing aid to poorer denizens of Highbury, for example—but more often she is concerned with behavior. Miss Bates, the daughter of the late vicar of Highbury, lives with her mother on a reduced income that will only continue to shrink. Emma might be materially generous with Bateses, but she often fails to show Miss Bates, whose conversational style Emma finds extremely irritating, an appropriate amount of respect. A pivotal scene in the novel concerns this, as Mr. Knightley upbraids Emma after she makes a joke in company at Miss Bates’ expense: “How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?” The fact that Emma is richer and higher in social standing than Miss Bates does not excuse her from her duty of care; if anything, Mr. Knightley argues, Emma owes Miss Bates more respect because of the difference in their situations. It is incumbent upon Emma to set aside more trivial feelings of annoyance and be gracious toward a well-intentioned woman who has always loved her.
Respect is also a major theme in Pride and Prejudice—Mr. Darcy’s major flaw for much of the novel is that he considers himself above his neighbors, and he insults Elizabeth and her family even as he proposes to her—but equally important is the keeping of an open mind. Absolute certainty is to be avoided. Elizabeth is sure that she knows all there is to know about Mr. Wickham’s history with the Darcy family, so much so that when she learns the truth she realizes, “Til this moment, I never knew myself.” (8) Mr. Darcy has such confidence in his ability to understand other people’s actions that he convinces himself that Jane Bennet never had any real romantic interest in his friend Mr. Bingley, despite the fact that Mr. Darcy barely knows Jane. The assumption that how an individual perceives the world is in fact how the world must be is the fallacy that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy must recognize and resolve before they can rectify their relationships with their friends and with each other.
Pride and Prejudice and Emma are novels of female education, in the Romantic sense—they are concerned with the development of their protagonists as rational women, who think as well as feel and learn from their mistakes. This requires Elizabeth and Emma to undergo a process of self-examination, often done in conversation with others. It is not until Mr. Darcy presents her with an explanation of Mr. Wickham’s past that Elizabeth realizes her vanity has previously caused her to stop seeking information about the situation. In Emma’s case, Mr. Knightley reminds her of what she has thought to herself many times over the course of the novel: that she needs to be kinder, and that she needs to stop imposing her will onto situations she does not fully understand. Both Emma and Elizabeth have to let go of the idea that they, and they alone, know best. In doing so, they move from isolation into community.
Many of us are craving that move ourselves, as the pandemic stretches on. While the social and economic structures depicted in Austen’s novels are not entirely comparable to my own, there is comfort in seeing some of my own pandemic-related concerns reflected—if slightly to the left, as it were—in the economic anxiety of the Bennet household and in the deep fear of loneliness that underpins so many of Emma’s actions. There are days when the past year and a half seem to me like one long exercise in the prioritization of individual certainty at the expense of community well-being, which is particularly infuriating given that we are also confronted daily with the fact that “our common life depends upon each other’s toil.” (9)
Austen’s emphasis on self-examination and our duty of care to each other speaks to us at this particular moment in time, and is indeed always relevant to the Church. The repudiation of total self-reliance makes us more aware of our relationships with other people and of our relationship with God, on whom all our hope is founded. When we remember that our lives are all bound up together and act in love accordingly, we fulfill the Great Commandment, and we too can say that we are quite blessed in our neighbors.
Byrne, Paula. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. HarperCollins, 2013. p. 204.
Ibid, p. 198.
Ibid, p. 205.
Qtd. in Byrne 203.
Jane Austen, letter to niece Anna Austen, September 9-18, 1814.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. Juliette Wells. Penguin: 2015. p. 114.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. HarperCollins, 2018. p. 184.
Ibid, p. 220.
The Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 134.
