There is the good Dr. Shirley in Persuasion, the ridiculous Mr. Elton in Emma, the wise and witty Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and always, of course, the presence of her own father, who unlike many lax churchmen of his day, lived among his parishioners as a Christian model. Mansfield Park examines, to some degree, the question of church ordination (at least this was Jane Austen’s intention), but nowhere in the novels do we feel a surge of communion with the divine and certainly no trace of sentimental or platitudinous sermonizing. Her letters reflect, but only indirectly, a conventional belief in an afterlife, suggesting that she was able to accept the death of family and friends with some equanimity—but these are polite letters, letters of form. She did write a few prayers, all of them beautifully but conventionally composed and meant for the family’s devotions:

Above all other blessings oh! God, for ourselves and our fellow-creatures, we implore thee to quicken our sense of thy mercy in the redemption of the world, of the value of that holy religion in which we have been brought up, that we may not, by our own neglect, throw away the salvation thou hast given us, nor be Christians only in name.

That exuberant “oh!” in the first line has Jane Austen’s energy, and the reference to a “religion in which we have been brought up” hints at Jane Austen’s spiritual obligation, but the rest of the prayer might have been written by any educated person of the time.

The exclusion of the religious impulse from her work may be no more than a belief that one’s sacred life is a private matter, an attitude consistent with her times; the nineteenth-century evangelistic wave was just making itself known, and it was not a movement she felt comfortable with. Both piety and fervor would have embarrassed her, and others must have perceived this disinclination. Her cousin the Reverend Edward Cooper, who became an evangelical, wrote her cheerful and amusing letters—“He dares not write otherwise to me,” she said, and the reader can almost imagine her chin going up and her eyebrows raised.

Still, it seems curious that she, a daughter and sister of clergymen, should not have touched more closely on the force, or at least the presence, of the spiritual in everyday life. Her brother Henry, shortly after her death, described her as being “thoroughly religious and devout,” but her letters and novels present a more secular being.

Nor did she use much of the extraordinary dramatic material that was immediately available to her. Tact, and tenderness for her sister, may have kept her from creating a fiancé who dies of yellow fever shortly before his wedding. Nowhere in her novels is there a clergyman (like her father) who also keeps a school, one of whose pupils, Lord Lymington, exhibited dramatically disordered psychological symptoms. Nor is there any sideways reference to the extraordinary adventures of her cousin Eliza and Eliza’s mother, Philadelphia.

It is a cliché to think of Jane Austen’s life as being without event, since insanity, treason, illegitimacy, and elopement invaded her quiet family circle, and even, once or twice, criminal proceedings. In 1799 her aunt, Jane Leigh-Perrot, was accused of stealing a piece of lace from a Bath shop. For this presumed crime she was imprisoned for several weeks and tried at Taunton assizes, where she was eventually acquitted. The case was widely reported in the press, and it is impossible that Jane Austen would not have followed the developments day by day. Mrs. Austen, in fact, offered to send her two daughters to the county jail at Ilchester to keep company with their aunt, an offer that was refused—almost certainly to the relief of the Austen sisters.

To many novelists, this episode, with its class confrontation and its soaring sense of injustice and cruelty, would have presented the basis for powerful fiction. Not a mention of it appears in Jane Austen’s fiction. Either it was unacceptable for her to drag in and further enlarge family difficulties or else she had other narratives she preferred to press forward. “She drew from nature; but whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals,” said her brother Henry in his Biographical Notice, which prefaced Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818.

Ralph Waldo Emerson remained puzzled by Jane Austen’s novels, unable to grasp their value, complaining that they were, in the end, about nothing more than the making of marriages. Her attachment to her subject matter, as book after book rolled under her pen, may puzzle contemporary readers too, though we read her presumed narrowness in the question of subject matter differently today, seeing the idea of marriage in an enlarged metaphorical sense: a homecoming, a bold glance at the wider world of connection and commitment. Emerson may have been troubled by her claim to be a witness to what he saw as a minor narrative arc, since Jane Austen herself never married and perhaps was never entirely swept up into the full sweetness of courtship. But Austen’s life and fiction rode different rails. Pride and Prejudice, that happiest of novels, erupted from a period of sadness, of personal disappointment. Elizabeth Bennet, a creation of Jane Austen’s pen, achieved what Austen must have craved in her own life, particularly at the end of the eighteenth century when personal sadness clouded her consciousness, taking from her grasp liberation, love, wealth, happiness, resolution, and—most especially—a sense of control over her own existence.

9

THE FINAL YEARS at Steventon were the waiting years, the in-between years. Mrs. Austen suffered periodic illness, which required attendance. Her daughter Jane had the “dignity,” as she put it rather caustically, of administering laudanum to her. Jane and Cassandra Austen, by now the ever available spinster sisters, were often called upon to give assistance in the homes of their relations; they alternated their visits to Godmersham, although it seems that Cassandra, who had by this time refined and perfected the role of aunt—and whose intelligence was less challenging to Edward’s wife—was the preferred visitor. The periods of enforced separation yielded an exchange of letters between the two sisters that comments on their ongoing life and offers material for speculation on the nature of their relationship.