Most modern readers think of Jane Austen as a modern writer. The popularity of her novels and their film adaptations over the last thirty years suggests that we see Austen as a kindred spirit who shares our belief in democracy and personal autonomy and our taste for irony and skepticism. The Austen in Laura Mooneyham White’s excellent book, however, is alien and unfamiliar, someone who espouses a religious worldview—that of the eighteenth-century Church of England—that few readers today would recognize, much less endorse. White might have chosen L. P. Hartley’s famous observation, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” as the epigraph to her book, for throughout the work she highlights what separates eighteenth-century Anglicans from contemporary readers and emphasizes the challenge those differences pose to understanding Austen’s novels. White believes we cannot understand Austen without considering her religious faith; she corrects modern readings of the novels that ignore or discount Austen’s religion and its tenets.

White builds on recent books on Austen and religion by Michael Giffin, Gene Koppel, Irene Collins, and William Jarvis. The turn to religion in Austen studies may at first seem odd. With the exception of Mansfield Park (1814), Austen does not focus on religious issues or controversies or even employ biblical rhetoric. She only quotes scripture twice, and she avoids the heavy-handed moralizing of religious novelists like Thomas Gisbourne or Hannah More. But the absence of overtly religious themes does not mean that religion was unimportant to Austen. White attributes Austen’s reticence to a highly developed sense of decorum: “she felt serious subjects belonged in wholly serious venues, not in the popular arena of fiction” (65). Austen’s refusal to wear her religion on her sleeve also reflects contemporary fears of religious enthusiasm. “Moderation” was the watchword of eighteenth-century Christianity; the memory of conflicts occasioned by passionate belief in the seventeenth century had a chastening effect on the outward expression of religious faith in the eighteenth.

White’s book consists of two major sections. The first, “Jane Austen and Anglicanism,” concisely describes the Church of England in Austen’s day and considers the presentation of religion in the novels. White examines the central concepts of eighteenth-century religion—the Great Chain of Being, natural law, providence—and explains how they inform Austen’s understanding of history and her attitudes to language, social rank, and nature. The second section of the book, “The Sins of the Author,” explores Austen’s struggles to reconcile her religious faith with her vocation as a novelist and her tendency to malicious wit. In a coda to the book, White contrasts Austen’s Emma (1815) with Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) to show the great gulf separating Austen’s world from an early version of our own. Throughout, White highlights the personal dimension of Austen’s religious commitments—her participation in worship, her avid reading of sermons, her composition of prayers. As a result, White’s work sometimes seems as much biographical as critical.

In one of White’s more interesting discussions, she emphasizes the importance of the liturgy in Austen’s life. Austen attended long morning and evening services each Sunday and participated in private prayers at home when sickness or other accidents prevented attendance at church. The rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer suffused her consciousness and daily life in a way difficult to appreciate from our own vantage. “Repetition was a key element of Austen’s church-going experience,” White asserts; she estimates that Austen prayed the Lord’s Prayer over 30,000 times in her life. The influence of Anglican words and rituals on Austen’s “mental landscape and sense of language” was immense (34).

White maintains that German Higher Criticism of the Bible and Enlightenment critiques of religion did not entice Austen. As the daughter of an Anglican parson and an inhabitant of Hampshire, which White characterizes as “one of the most observant and faithful shires in Britain” at the time, Austen accepted traditional Christian beliefs about a rational, hierarchically arranged world (46). To Austen, democracy would have been highly threatening in its critique of ancient social hierarchies. In some of her strongest analysis, White suggests that Austen’s preference for restrained, unadorned language reflects her fear of social disorder. But Austen was not beyond questioning traditional pieties. The novels explore the intricacies of social rank and show Austen’s willingness to criticize the conventional association of merit with high status. White believes that Austen professes an “ameliorated” view of social hierarchies and accepted that some movement is allowable and, indeed, desirable (109).

Austen’s wit is a primary source of pleasure for today’s readers. Because we value wit so highly, White implies, we regard Austen’s work as more subversive than we should. Wit and humor inspired theological reflection in Austen. White highlights the tensions Austen felt between her Christian faith, which required her to regard others charitably, and her innate wit, which often led her to ridicule those around her. Drawing on Austen’s letters and written prayers, White explores this conflict and explains how it animates the novels. Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet, and Mary Crawford all struggle with malicious wit, and Austen pays close attention to the difficulty of responding to others with candor—a term, White points out, that in the eighteenth century indicated generosity and sympathy rather than frankness or honesty. Austen knew that her vocation as a novelist potentially conflicted with her faith, and her novels reflect this conflict in their investigation of characters whose imaginations and fantasies wreak havoc on others.

White’s argument about the importance of religion to Austen is convincing, and, after this book, it will be hard for critics to dismiss the importance of religion to understanding Austen. In trying to correct the lamentable neglect of Austen’s religion by contemporary critics, however, she perhaps swings the pendulum too far in the other direction. White’s Austen seems too much a conventionally pious eighteenth-century woman; if she was merely that, she would not have enjoyed almost universal and enduring appeal for the past two hundred years. But White makes us aware of the creative tension between an author’s era and her genius, and for that we should be grateful. Well written and thoroughly researched, this book offers new insight into the religious beliefs that shaped Jane Austen. It is an important contribution to Austen scholarship.