Q&A: experts answer your Jane Austen questions
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What questions do listeners have about Jane Austen?
Welcome back to Jane Austen's Paper Trail for our bonus Q&A episode. We were delighted that so many of you tuned into the podcast and even happier to receive so many emails with your Jane Austen questions. You'll be pleased to hear that unlike Cassandra Austen, we won't be burning your letters. Instead, in this episode, I'll be presenting them to our expert panel and demanding some answers. Our first panellist is Emma Clare Sweeney, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University and author of The Secret Sisterhood, The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bronte, Eliot and Wolfe. Welcome to the podcast, Emma.
Thank you.
I'm also joined by John Mullen, Professor of Literature at University College London and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen. Hello, John.
Hello.
And completing our trio is the director of Jane Austen's house in Hampshire, Lizzie Dunford. Thanks so much for joining us, Lizzie. Thank you for having me. So to kick us off, I'm rummaging around in my sort of virtual bag of letters for Jane Austen. And we have an email from a listener called Sarah Hoxbergen. Sarah writes, I'm curious to know what we know about Jane Austen and faith, and also Jane Austen and religion. How did Austen's personal faith influence her? And how did she view the institution of the church in her day? Lizzie, can you shed some light on that one?
It's a fascinating question, but also one that with so often is really hard to answer. She doesn't really talk about this herself. And the only way to understand her faith is to look at her acts and look at what she did. She presents the institutions of the church Interestingly, within her novels, with a broad spectrum of critique and praise and understanding, but she also presents her clergymen as people rather than necessarily representatives. And I'd be really interested to hear what everybody else on the panel thinks. It's a very difficult question to answer, actually.
One of my favourite documents relating to Jane Austen are the entries that she made in the parish register of her father's church in Steventon when she was probably about 15. And she imagines marrying three different men. And they sound quite different. I think it's Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam of London, Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool, and then the much more ordinary sounding Jack Smith of And so I think there's a lovely sense of playfulness there, being able to mess around with an ecclesiastical document, I suppose.
I mean, I think if you're the daughter of a clergyman, several of your brothers become clergymen, you have a fairly pragmatic and worldly sense of what the church is about. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that in her private heart of hearts, Jane Austen was a sort of sceptic about religion. But I think it's unimaginable that somebody who wrote some of the passages of Mansfield Park could have been an unbeliever, actually, because although I think Fanny Price is not necessarily exemplary in the exchanges between her and Mary Crawford about religion, what it's like to have a chapel in a big house and why you go to chapel and why you listen to sermons and what you're doing when you're writing a sermon.
I think somebody couldn't have written that if they didn't themselves have a fairly firm religious faith themselves. But equally, arguably, the most ridiculous and the nastiest men in all her fiction are both clergymen. The most ridiculous is Mr. Collins. And I think the nastiest is Mr. Elton, who is downright horrible. I mean, he's extremely nasty, but he's got to be accepted as the man who is the incarnation of religion in that country. village or town and who eventually of course will preside at the wedding of Emma and Mr Knightley you know there's literally no getting away from him so I think she was very clear-eyed about what kind of people might actually go into the church
I think that makes the distinction really clear there actually between, as the question asked, Austen's faith perhaps, and then her thoughts on the institution of the church.
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