Sense and Sensitivity
Jane Austen wrote as a Christian, but all the better for doing so unobtrusively.
1821
Jane Austen wrote as a Christian, but all the better for doing so unobtrusively.
1821
Jane Austen’s novels are not fluffy romances, but profound modern fables, leaving the reader amused but also thinking about serious subjects. Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, was one of the first reviewers to recognise what Jane was hoping to achieve, and appreciate her way of achieving it.
abridged
MISS Austin has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive.
She might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels, (as Coelebs was designated, we will not say altogether without reason,) a ‘dramatic sermon.’* The subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than studiously brought forward and dwelt upon.
For when the purpose of inculcating a religious principle is made too palpably prominent, many readers, if they do not throw aside the book with disgust, are apt to fortify themselves with that respectful kind of apathy with which they undergo a regular sermon, and prepare themselves as they do to swallow a dose of medicine, endeavouring to get it down in large gulps, without tasting it more than is necessary.
abridged
‘Coelebs in Search of a Wife’ is a novel by Hannah More (1745-1833) published in 1809, and followed by ‘Coelebs Married’ five years later. Hannah More was a successful novelist and playwright (Mozart possessed a copy of her play ‘Percy’), a philanthropist, and a vocal anti-slavery campaigner.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Did Whately think that novels with a Christian message were a good thing?
Yes, so long as it was unobtrustive.