The biggest problem with Jane Austen is that her writing seems too easy. For serious thinkers, her writing is almost dismissed before it is considered. Even non-Austen fans think they have her neatly categorized. She is a little too cloyingly domestic. Safe. Familiar. Chick flicks.
But familiarity is a camouflage. Because the surface is easily digestible, the deeper content is lost on many of us.
A girl in a bonnet must be in want of a boyfriend.
It is true that every one of her stories is a love story. And yet it is not a love story. The wedding at the end is not merely wrapping up a rom-com. For Jane Austen, the characters have to earn the wedding, and the wedding symbolically points to something much greater.
In that way, her novels are like poems: everything symbolically points to something else, if we can but learn how to read it.
I am launching a Jane Austen blog and podcast called Austen and Eden. So you can consider this an introduction to both the Austen and Eden podcast and the Austen and Eden blog.
Why Austen and Eden?
Lasting stories follow the same patterns. From classic fairy tales down to C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter, and of course Jane Austen, the great stories carry timeless motifs.
These patterns are the hidden reasons we love a good story without knowing why. They slip past our defenses, speak to the soul, and shape who we become.
This blog is for you if you love Jane Austen but do not want to stop there. Austen is our open door into deeper storytelling. Into the kinds of stories that go all the way back to a garden.
Meaning any good story, even right down to today’s Hollywood movies and Netflix shows: if they are good, they contain at least something of Edenic storytelling.
Or to put it another way, the Eden narrative stands as an archetypal narrative for all stories. It is like a husk or a seed in which all other stories are contained. More on that as we explore literature.
Jane Austen’s stories include many motifs from the garden: the dragon in disguise, the fall, temptation, the deceitfulness of sin, and many more themes.
But first I want to clear up three common misconceptions about Jane Austen.
Misconception 1: she wrote “small”
One common explanation is that she wrote about small things because she thought small. She wrote what she knew, and what she knew was a drawing room. There is some truth in the first half of that. She did avoid subjects she did not know. The assumption hiding in the second half is that she would have written war stories if she could have stood at the front, for example. That she would have written something more dramatic if only she had been given the chance.
The smallness was a deliberate, seasoned, mature choice. Bigger is not always better. Austen elevated quality over scope.
Stuart Tave, my favorite commentator on Austen, put the point cleanly in Some Words of Jane Austen. She knew, he wrote, “that she had made the choice not of weakness and the merely female, but the choice of difficulty, originality, and meaning. She had always known the absurdity of an art that thinks it is strong and full and large because it tries to run in a large world.”
Big plots full of car-chase scenes and explosions often rely on these as crutches. They fill the space left by a lack of originality. What Austen does in dialogue is the opposite of filler.
Her contemporaries split on exactly this point. Charlotte Brontë, from her Gothic height, looked down on Austen’s work as something like a neat and tidy garden, whereas Brontë wrote of the haunting Gothic wildness of the moors.
Sir Walter Scott, who wrote the big adventure stories of the age and could do what he called the “Big Bow-wow strain” himself, recognized in Jane Austen what he did not have. In his journal he called her talent for the involvements, feelings, and characters of ordinary life “the most wonderful I ever met with,” and the exquisite touch that renders commonplace things and characters interesting “from the truth of the description and the sentiment” a gift he knew he did not have.
Tave’s reading of Scott is that he does not treat her as timid, or as someone who turns from reality by limiting her incidents and her appeals to the reader. He treats her as adventurous, original, and more real. Keeping close to common incidents, and to characters who occupy the ordinary walks of life, her work has so much spirit that we never miss the uncommon event.
He knew that it is hard to do more with less.
There is something biblical in that restraint. When God sends his people into exile, he tells them to build houses, plant vineyards, and tend what is actually theirs, and to tend it well. Make your world small and be faithful in it. The world Austen made resembles the world she lived in, and the resemblance is not an accident.
Misconception 2: she wrote sentimental, nostalgic stories (the “brand” problem)
We live in a consumer culture that brands everything. A title, a girl in a bonnet, and the book gets shelved with Amish romance as nostalgic, girly, escapist literature. That branding causes real trouble here, because there is simply no truth in it.
In her own day Austen wrote fresh, modern, fiercely intellectual stories. Bonnets were as normal as Walmart.
She does not celebrate sentimentalism. She condemns it, loudly, in a great deal of her work. She was not writing nostalgia. She was critiquing it.
Sense and Sensibility is the clearest picture. Sentimentalism there is attached to brutality. When a character in Austen is overly sentimental, something brutal is usually waiting on the other side of it.
Dante does something similar in the Inferno with the misers and the spendthrifts, two faces of one vice. Austen had read Dante. The sentimental figures in her novels are often among the villains. They use fine feeling to quiet a conscience while behaving in inhumane ways. The bonnets and teacups could not be further from the point. That was what people wore. Read her only on that surface and you are reading materialistically, and missing the stories.
Misconception 3: she was a secular feminist author
Two ideas get lumped together here, and both need separating from the novels.
Many feminists love Austen. Her heroines are feisty and intellectual. They are not doormats. Search online and you will find plenty of claims that she was an early feminist. The claim does not hold. The subject is complicated, because some of the limits placed on women in her time were not good.
Even so, most of her books celebrate the right kind of male authority. Proper male authority is present in every novel she wrote, and it is presented as a good.
The other half of the misconception is that she was secular. Plenty of readers, including Christians, assume her faith was merely social, a demographic fact. Nobody converts on the page. There were no former drug addicts. Christianity is not discussed in the language of a tract. Therefore, the reasoning goes, she was not a Christian writer.
That standard confuses propaganda with storytelling. Forcing Christianity onto a plot is not the Edenic tradition. It is usually bad storytelling with a preachy message slapped on top. Austen showed her faith in the stories she told and in the patterns she used, and that reaches further.
For the record, she was a committed Christian who received God’s wisdom deeply. Irene Collins’s Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter chronicles the historical depth of that faith. Paula Hollingsworth’s The Spirituality of Jane Austen works along similar lines. Austen’s own prayers are also worth reading.
She was also a good artist, and she knew that to tell art well is, in some measure, to conceal art.
She used the made world symbolically, so a great deal of her Christian vision sits in the symbolism. Everything is integrated. The world is a connected whole, and she shows you that. The more you read her, the more of it appears.
The Christian symbolism is rich. It asks to be searched for, if you are not used to seeing it in fiction, and then it becomes a rewarding key.
Readers who return to Austen are not only returning to a favorite author. They are answering something in the work that speaks to the depth of their own humanity. That is a better reason to keep reading than the bonnet, and a better reason than the branding.
The Austen and Eden podcast
Austen and Eden is a podcast hosted by Noelle McEachran and Erin Farley for readers who want to go past fandom and look at what Austen was actually doing. Noelle writes at noellemceachran.com. For lighter notes on Austen, classic stories, and new fiction, join the newsletter.
If this is the Austen you have been looking for, do not stop at the essay. Subscribe to Austen and Eden wherever you get your podcasts, and start with episode one. Each episode will have a companion piece here, so you can listen, then keep reading past the bonnet.
Subscribe to the podcast, and join the newsletter if you want the essays in your inbox.
Works and people mentioned
- Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; her prayers
- Stuart M. Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen (University of Chicago Press, 1973)
- Sir Walter Scott, journal entry of 14 March 1826 on Pride and Prejudice
- Charlotte Brontë, on Austen’s supposed limitation
- Irene Collins, Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter
- Paula Hollingsworth, The Spirituality of Jane Austen
- Dante, Inferno (the misers and the spendthrifts)
- C. S. Lewis; the Harry Potter stories, as later carriers of the same storytelling patterns