Jane Austen only seems to have written romances. In truth, she was deeply preoccupied with how people become virtuous (or not). Alasdair MacIntyre identified Austen’s understanding of virtue as belonging to the Christian and Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics. In After Virtue, he says, “It is her uniting of Christian and Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Austen the last great effective imaginative voice in the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues which I have tried to identify.” [1]
While her novels all end in marriages, those marriages are both the culmination and beginning of a certain kind of communal virtue formation. Marriage as such is not the telos for Austen’s characters, but rather a particular school of virtue. The obstacles to her heroines’ marriages–the cruel parents, delayed inheritance, vocational crises, etc.–are precisely what expose her heroines’ need for virtues they don’t yet possess.
Ideally, virtue formation begins in childhood with a good education, virtuous adults to imitate, encouragement to read, and practices of regular prayer. Since virtue is built through the practice and the cultivation of habits, children who become virtuous must be surrounded by adults who share a vision for their own telos: to be happy in the Aristotelian sense; to be virtuous and therefore fulfilled. As Christians we can add, to be a saint.
Austen has much to say about how parents shape a person in either virtue or vice. Parents who leave their children to their own devices live to regret it (think of Mr. Bennett). In fact, most Austen parents fail to form their children in all the ways needed to live a virtuous life. And yet, Austen’s heroines all overcome the deficiencies of their upbringing to become virtuous women. Taking all her novels together, we can see that Austen saw several personal traits and habits as being necessary to “rescue” a person from the consequences of an insufficient or absent childhood moral education: 1) attunement to nature; 2) habits of reading and contemplation; 3) self-reflection.
Attunement to Nature
For Austen, becoming virtuous means being aligned with and attuned to reality, and that necessitates observing and enjoying nature. Her virtuous characters are sensitive to nature to varying degrees. They do not always share Marianne’s romantic passion for “dead leaves,”[2] but a character’s ability to appreciate and see nature often signals her relationship with reality.
In Mansfield Park, when the young people take a trip to Southerton, Fanny Price and Miss Crawford share a carriage ride, but their internal experience could not be more different. For Fanny,
Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions; and in observing the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children, she found entertainment that could only have been heightened by having Edmund to speak to of what she felt.[3]
In contrast, Mary Crawford “had none of Fanny’s delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling; she saw nature, inanimate nature, with little observation; her attention was all for men and women, her talents for the light and lively.”[4] The narrator weighs Mary’s mind and finds it wanting. The brilliant line “nature, inanimate nature” is a sly perspective shift into Mary’s “voice” whereby the narrator shows us what Mary sees around her—ostensibly the same trees and soil and children that Fanny sees—but for Mary they are “inanimate.” Because they will not serve for a flirtation, they hold no interest for her mind. Mary’s mind is numb and closed off to the life and beauty around her.
In contrast, the world is alive for Fanny. Later in the novel, as she stands with Edmund looking out into the night sky filled with stars, she says,
When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.[5]
For Fanny, nature is what carries a person out of herself to the transcendent. A soul that is “awake” to the beautiful and transcendent in nature will likewise be awake to the morally transcendent. Mary Crawford is morally numb in part because she is closed off to reality in nature. Fanny must grow in the virtue of courage, but she is able to grow at all because her soul is alive.
Reading and Contemplation
Austen was both a reader and a thinker, and her characters’ relationships to books tell us much about their character.
In a conversation with the heartbroken Captain Benwick at Lyme, Anne recommends “collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the strongest examples of moral and religious endurances.”[6] Anne shares books and letters that she had read herself. Reading and reflecting on them had given Anne the fortitude she needed to weather nine years of regret. Although Anne’s family had not supplied her with either moral instruction or models of virtue in her childhood, her habits of reading and contemplating help her grow into a virtuous woman who can weather sorrow and trouble.
Catherine Moreland was not a good student as a child,[7] and describes her mother’s education as indifferent and even tortuous,[8] but her obsession with Gothic novels acts as an education in itself. While she mistakes how books are applicable to reality, her instinct to read and compare life to what she has read is a good one. While Catherine’s growth will necessitate broadening and improving the quality of her reading, her practice of seeing the world in light of her reading is a form of contemplation.
Peter Leithart says, “In the end, Gothic fiction is not so misleading as we might be led to believe. The “ideas” that it “admits” are valuable for shaping imagination, moral insight, and conduct.”[9] Because of Catherine’s immaturity, she misinterprets the scale of the villainy she comes across, but she is correct in discerning a likeness between General Tilney and the villains from her novels.[10] It is precisely this habit of reading and contemplation that gives her insight into the character of those around her.
Self-reflection
While religion is rarely foregrounded in Austen’s novels, C.S. Lewis and Sara Emsley have both pointed to the religious overtones in the “undeceptions”[11] that her protagonists experience. In A Note on Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis observes the religious language used to describe Marianne’s attitude toward her past foolish behavior:
…the very vocabulary of the passage strikes a note unfamiliar in Jane Austen’s style. It makes explicit, for once, the religious background of the author’s ethical position. Hence such theological or nearly-theological words as penitence, even the torture of penitence, amendment, self-destruction, my God.[12]
Marianne has this moral awakening after a long illness and recovery that forced her to reflect on her life.[13] Emsley observes the similarity between her characters’ self-reflection and a line from one of Austen’s prayers:
Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of temper and every evil habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own souls.[14]
This conviction of one’s own moral failings appears most strongly in the arcs of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Marianne Dashwood.[15] After Elizabeth reads Mr. Darcy’s letter, she realizes that she had been seeing what she wanted to see in Wickham.
She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. . . ‘How despicably have I acted!’ she cried. – ‘I, who have prided myself on my discernment!… I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away… Till this moment I never knew myself.’[16]
Elizabeth recognizes that what she had called discernment was actually willful blindness and prejudice. Her willingness to honestly self-reflect and her resolve to change allow her to grow in virtue.
In Emma, after Mr. Knightley confronts Emma for insulting Miss Bates, Emma had never “felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. . . She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates!”[17] Emma’s heart is revealed to herself and she resolves to never again neglect Miss Bates or any others. Emma suffers similarly when it becomes clear that what she thought was a friendship with Harriet Smith was something else entirely:
Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes … How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on! It struck her with dreadful force, and she was ready to give it every bad name in the world.[18]
Emma cannot build the virtues of amiability or charity until she realizes that, far from being a true friend to Harriet, she is simply meddling with and manipulating her. Emma’s painful self-reflection will lead to virtue as she learns to discern her own motivations.
In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne’s illness “gave [her] leisure and calmness for serious recollection.” As she reflects on her past behavior, she tells Elinor that she sees “nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself, and want of kindness to others. . . .”[19] She desires to atone to God for her unkind and imprudent actions and to become more like her virtuous sister. Her illness was a forced period of self-reflection, one which forced her to see her own heart and confront her habits of selfish emotional indulgence. With her new awareness that her excessive sensibility is actually unvirtuous, Marianne can begin to balance emotion with reason, and to cultivate prudence.
Emsley connects these heroines’ self-reflection to another of Austen’s prayers:
Reflecting on the past, these heroines examine their judgment of, and behavior toward, the people around them: in the language of the first prayer, they fulfill the injunction to “consider how the past day has been spent by us, what have been our prevailing thoughts, words and actions during it, and how far we can acquit ourselves of evil.”[20]
As Thomas Rodham remarks, “this is virtue ethics at a different level – it’s about moral vision, not just moral content.”[21] Austen does not simply show us what a moral education looks like; she invites us into her own school of morals. Reading her novels is an exercise in contemplation on the Good. We read so that we too may become undeceived.
Conclusion
While attunement to nature, reading and contemplation, and self-reflection are all necessary means by which one can gain a moral education, they are not sufficient. The question remains: how does one convert from an unvirtuous person to a virtuous person? How does a Mary Crawford become a Fanny Price?
We should not miss that the only characters who ever undergo such “undeceptions” are those whose will was already oriented to the good. Austen’s heroines are devout Christian women whose whole self-understanding orbits around conforming to the Good. But Mary Crawford doesn’t possess the smallest drop of piety. Although she has some of the traits I have outlined here–she is well-read, and knows her own mind, for example–she does not want to be virtuous, and therefore she cannot be virtuous. Her “contemplations” are all of men and women and the selfish machinations of worldly society. Her will is set on the temporal and carnal, and refuses to engage with the transcendent. When confronted with the horrific reality of her brother’s adultery, Mary can only see the inconvenience and imprudence of the affair; she is totally insensible to the moral offense.[22] Mary’s will is bent away from the good, so that even her habits of reading and self-reflection cannot save her from her moral miseducation.
Ultimately, what draws each of Austen’s heroines–and what drew Austen herself– on their moral pilgrimage–was a will oriented toward the good. Henry Austen said of his sister that she:
. . . was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature. On serious subjects she was well-instructed, both by reading and meditation, and her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church.[23]
While no eulogy can be said to be an exact portrait of the deceased, it’s significant that Henry mentions “reading and meditation” as particular characteristics of Austen’s moral life. Austen was not theorizing about the path to virtue in her novels: her heroines revealed her own practices as she grew in virtue.
Robin Jean Harris is a theology student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She is the Interim Senior Editor of Ad Fontes and is on the board of the Davenant Institute. Her writing can be found at Ad Fontes, Theopolis Institute, Mere Orthodoxy, and her personal Substack, robinjeanharris.substack.com.
[1] Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue, 3rd edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007,240.
[2] Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, in The Complete Novels. Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler. Penguin Classics, 2006, chapter 16.
[3] Austen, Mansfield Park, chapter 8.
[4] Austen, Mansfield Park, chapter 8.
[5] Austen, Mansfield Park, chapter 11.
[6] Austen, Persuasion, chapter 11.
[7] Austen, Northanger Abbey, chapter 1.
[8] Austen, Northanger Abbey, chapter 14.
[9] Peter Leithart, Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen. Canon Press, 2004, 83.
[10] Austen, Northanger Abbey, chapter 14.
[11] C.S. Lewis’s term from “A Note on Jane Austen”, in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
[12] Lewis, “A Note on Jane Austen”, Selected Literary Essays, 177.
[13] Austen, Sense and Sensibility, chapter 46.
[14] Emsley, Sarah. Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues. Palgrave Macmillian, 2005,8.
[15] CS Lewis also includes Catherine Morland in this list, but for the sake of space, and because her “conversion” is more intellectual than moral, I am limiting this discussion to the other three.
[16] Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 36.
[17] Austen, Emma, chapter 43.
[18] Austen, Emma, chapter 47.
[19] Austen, Sense and Sensibility, chapter 46.
[20] Emsley, Philosophy of the Virtues, 9.
[21] Rodham, Thomas. “Reading Jane Austen as a Moral Philosopher”, Philosophy Now, 2013.
[22] Austen, Mansfield Park, chapter 47.
[23] Emsley, Philosophy of the Virtues, 6-7.