How Jane Austen Taught Virtue

Part one of a four-part series on Jane Austen, virtue, and friendship

A couple months ago, I presented a paper at the Davenant Institute’s Spring Convivium (mini-conference) on Jane Austen, Virtue, and Friendship. It’s a little too long and unlike my normal posting to publish here as-is, so I’m breaking it up into several installments. Nothing will be properly cited here, but I will include my sources in the last installment in case you want to do some further reading. This will be the first in a four-part series on the connection Jane Austen saw between the virtue of charity and friendship. In this first installment, I want to explain why I think it’s even worth looking so closely at Jane Austen’s work, not just as a source of enjoyable literature, but as a sophisticated and highly skilled teacher of practical virtue.

Austen lived a relatively short and confined life, and it’s surprising that she should have revolutionized literature the way she did. Although she enjoyed the novels of her time—including the silly Gothic novels she satirizes in Northanger Abbey—when she wrote she did something wholly new and unprecedented. Austen invented the literary technique known as free indirect style, or narrated monologue, as Dorrit Cohn called it, in which the author’s narration takes on the character’s worldview and habits of communication style.

Here is just one example: When the Dashwoods move into their new home at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility, Austen tells us that, “As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact, but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles.” (Sense and Sensibility, chap 6) It’s easy to miss, but this sentence doesn’t describe what Austen thought of Barton Cottage; this is quite clearly from the romantic Marianne’s perspective. We are seeing Barton Cottage through her eyes, which look only for wild beauty and find no value in practical considerations.

This technique is now so common in modern novels—although generally less skillfully executed—that we don’t even notice it, or remember what literature was like before Austen quietly introduced the device.

In this way, Austen opens her characters’ minds to us with their value system, their longings, their pettiness and self-deception. We are not told how they are as people, we find out by watching them think and process and respond to the world. By syncing our imaginations and emotions up with her characters in all their foolishness and goodness and—occasionally—evil, Austen is able to teach us virtue more skillfully than any moralist or preacher.

For Austen, virtue is the outworking of real, living faith. Community is the playing field on which we work out our sanctification, and the virtues are precisely what allow us to imitate Christ in our thoughts, words, and actions.

The characters in Austen’s novels are certainly “religious rather than spiritual,” in the sense that we see them going to Church and occasionally saying their prayers, but we never see them having the sort of ecstatic heart-experiences that began to be common in the revivalist movements of her day. However it does not follow that Austen’s Christianity was empty or devoid of genuine feeling. For Austen, religion must be real in order to be efficacious. Characters who flout outward religiously social mores—such as “rules” governing behavior between the sexes, traveling on Sunday, and valuing regular Church attendance—often plunge headlong into social, physical, and spiritual ruin. Hypocritical characters (Think Wickham, Willoughby, Mr. Eliot) conform to outward mores and expectations while having depraved inward intentions. And these intentions always finally manifest themselves, often to their own ruin as well as anyone who partners with them.

By recovering an understanding of the importance of the virtues, we can begin to recover a way of thinking, talking, and acting out our faith that is both inward and outward, both experiential and objective, both spiritual and religious. It really does matter whether we “mean it.” But spiritual intention without outward fruit is worthless. We are not commissioned by God to go out into the world and have many tender feelings toward him. Conversely, what value is it if we work in God’s kingdom if we neglect the opportunity to have genuine, living, heart-relationship with our Bridegroom?

Let’s take a look then, at how Austen uses virtue to teach us how to live as Christians.

Jane Austen never asked questions like, “How do I self-actualize?” “Is this relationship really serving me?” or “What do I really want in life?” Rather in her novels she asked, “How does one grow in virtue?” “What does the process of moral education look like in its particulars?” and “How can community help or hinder our moral education?”

In After Virtue, Alastair McIntyre argues that Austen is in fact, “the last great representative of the classical tradition of the virtues.” And in his essay, A Note on Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis says, “If charity is the poetry of conduct and honor the rhetoric of conduct, Jane Austen’s ‘principles’ might be described as the grammar of conduct. Now grammar is something that anyone can learn; it is also something that everyone must learn.” (Essays in Literary Criticism, 185)

Austen was intensely interested in discovering how a particular person should behave in a particular situation. Some, like Sarah Emsley, have even argued that she has inherited Aristotle’s understanding of virtue. Emsley writes, 

For her fictional characters, virtue (or its absence) is demonstrated through their Aristotelian or Christian moral deliberations and judgment (or lack thereof), and thus I argue that Austen participates in a tradition of the virtues that stresses character and action… For Austen, as for Aristotle, virtue is a disposition and is chosen, acquired, and practiced through habit: the process is important, and there is an end in view. (Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, 18)

For my purposes here, I will not interact with these arguments directly, but will trust that MacIntyre and Emsley have done their homework, and that Austen is working with an understanding of ethics that is both Christian and Aristotelian. Over the next three installments of this series, I will look at her novel Emma to gain an understanding of Austen’s philosophy of friendship. I will show that for Austen, charity is the fundamental virtue required for a true friendship, and that essential to charity is an ability to see the other person truly and to speak the truth to them, and that if a person does not practice to develop the virtue of charity, he or she will be unable to enter into a true friendship.