Tag: Jane Austen

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O’Connell — Origins of the English Marriage Plot

O’Connell, Lisa. The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

“Why did marriage become central to the English novel in the eighteenth-century? As clandestine weddings and the unruly culture that surrounded them began to threaten power and property, questions about where and how to marry became urgent matters of public debate. In 1753, in an unprecedented and controversial use of state power, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke mandated Anglican church weddings as marriage’s only legal form. Resistance to his Marriage Act would fuel a new kind of realist marriage plot in England and help to produce political radicalism as we know it. Focusing on how major authors from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen made church weddings a lynchpin of their fiction, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot offers a truly innovative account of the rise of the novel by telling the story of the English marriage plot’s engagement with the most compelling political and social questions of its time.”

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Collins — Jane Austen, the Parson’s Daughter

Collins, Irene. Jane Austen, the Parson’s Daughter. London: Hambledon Press, 1998.

Abstract: “Jane Austen was a clergyman’s daughter, related to other clergy, born and brought up in a parsonage. Many of her attitudes, expressed in her novels, reflect this directly or indirectly. Her father’s reasoned and practical approach to religion, along with the range of books available to her in his library, shaped the essentially moral outlook behind her entertaining, but devastating, criticism of individuals and of society. ¶ Her attitude to the gentry is subtly ambivalent. Accepted as a clergyman’s daughter in local society, Jane Austen sometimes mirrors their prejudices, seen for instance in her characterisation of the haughty aristocrat Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. At the same time, her own marginal position in gentry society gave her personal experience of the slights and snobberies inherent in the subtle class distinctions of the time. As the years went by, she became more and more sensitive about the position of women without money of their own, and wrote feelingly in Emma of the lowered status of a parson’s daughter who has died. ¶ Jane Austen’s life coincided with her country’s war against Revolutionary France. It has often seemed surprising that she never mentions war explicitly in her novels, especially as two of her brothers were officers in the navy and another in the militia. Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter shows how Jane Austen in fact drew on an extensive knowledge of wartime conditions not only in Pride and Prejudice with its militia regiment, and in Mansfield Park and Persuasion with their sailors, but also in Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and even Emma — though the latter never moves outside the village of Highbury.”

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Madsen — Nun in the Garret

Madsen, Emily. “The Nun in the Garret: The Marriage Plot and Religious Epistemology in the Victorian Novel.” Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2015.

Dissertation Abstracts International 76 (December 2015): 76.

Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Mary Ward.

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Collins — Jane Austen and the Clergy

Collins, Irene. Jane Austen and the Clergy. London: Hambledon, 1994.

Abstract: Jane Austen was the daughter of a clergyman, the sister of two others and the cousin of four more. Her principal acquaintances were clergymen and their families, whose social, intellectual and religious attitudes she shared. Yet while clergymen feature in all her novels, often in major roles, there has been little recognition of their significance. To many readers their status and profession is a mystery, as they appear simply to be a sub-species of gentlemen and never seem to perform any duties. Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice is often regarded as little more than a figure of fun. ¶ Astonishingly, Jane Austen and the Clergy is the first book to demonstrate the importance of Jane Austen’s clerical background and to explain the clergy in her novels, whether Mr Tilney in Northanger Abbey, Mr Elton in Emma, or a less prominent character such as Dr Grant in Mansfield Park. In this exceptionally well-written and enjoyable book, Irene Collins draws on a wide knowledge of the literature and history of the period to describe who the clergy were, both in the novels and in life: how they were educated and appointed, the houses they lived in and the gardens they designed and cultivated, the women they married, their professional and social context, their income, their duties, their moral outlook and their beliefs. Jane Austen and the Clergy uses the facts of Jane Austen’s life and the evidence contained in her letters and novels to give a vivid and convincing portrait of the contemporary clergy.

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Chapman — English Literature and Religion

Chapman, Edward M. English Literature and Religion, 1800-1900. London: Constable; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.

Treats, among others, Cowper, Crabbe, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keble, Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin, Austen, Scott, the Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Morris, Kipling, Hardy.

Digital version: HathiTrust.

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Lemon — Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature

Lemon, Rebecca. The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature. Chichester and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Contents: Part 1. — General introduction (by Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts). — The literature of the Bible (by Christopher Rowland). — Biblical hermeneutics and literary theory (by David Jasper). — Part 2: Medieval. — Introduction (by Daniel Anlezark) — Old English poetry (by Catherine A. M. Clarke). — The medieval religious lyric (Douglas Gray). — The Middle English mystics (by Annie Sutherland). — The Pearl-poet (by Helen Barr). — William Langland (by Mary Clemente Davlin). — Geoffrey Chaucer (by Christiania Whitehead). — Part 3: Early modern. — Introduction (Roger Pooley). — Early modern women (by Elizabeth Clarke). — Early modern religious prose (by Julie Maxwell). —Edmund Spenser (by Carol V. Kaske). — Mary Sidney (Rivkah Zim). — William Shakespeare (by Hannibal Hamlin). — John Donne (by Jeanne Shami). — George Herbert (by John Drury). — John Milton (by Michael Lieb). —John Bunyan (by Andrew Bradstock). — John Dryden (by Gerard Reedy). — Part 4: Eighteenth century and Romantic. — Introduction (by Stephen Prickett). — Eighteenth-century hymn writers (by J. R. Watson). — Daniel Defoe (by Valentine Cunningham). — Jonathan Swift (by Michael F. Suarez). — William Blake (by Jonathan Roberts and Christopher Rowland). — Women Romantic poets (by Penny Bradshaw). — William Wordsworth (by Deeanne Westbrook). — S. T. Coleridge (by Graham Davidson). — Jane Austen (by Michael Giffin). — George Gordon Byron (by Wolf Z. Hirst). —P. B. Shelley (by Bernard Beatty). — Part 5: Victorian. — Introduction (by Elisabeth Jay). — The Brownings (by Kevin Mills). — Alfred Tennyson (by Kirstie Blair). — The Brontës (by Marianne Thormählen). — John Ruskin (by Dinah Birch). — George Eliot (by Charles LaPorte). — Christina Rossetti (by Elizabeth Ludlow). — G. M. Hopkins (by Paul S. Fiddes). — Sensation fiction (by Mark Knight). — Decadence (by Andrew Tate). — Part 6: Modernist. — Introduction (by Ward Blanton). —W. B. Yeats (by Edward Larrissy). — Virginia Woolf (by Douglas L. Howard). — James Joyce (by William Franke). — D. H. Lawrence (by T. R. Wright). — T. S. Eliot (by David Fuller). — The Great War poets (by Jane Potter).