Jane Austen (Christian Encounters Series)

Why yet another book about acclaimed novelist Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)? in the Acknowledgments to his biography of 2010, JANE AUSTEN, author Peter Leithart puts himself down as "a theologian" who has been given "a chance to pontificate on literature." The much published author teaches at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. ***** Dr Leithart works hard to make a few points:-- (1) Jane Austen was a devout Christian. She was not, however, a hot gospeler evangelical. She accepted her clerical father's views on religion, sober main-stream late 18th Century Anglicanism. This view of Austen is meant to correct earlier distortions that made her either a fervently emotional evangelical or a merely nominal, outwardly conforming Christian.-- (2) At some level Austen remained a 15-year old girl named Jenny: ever humorous, with a fresh slant on all the common aspects of life and her small social and family circles. Critics at their peril ignore the Jenny in Jane Austen.-- (3) Jane Austen in her six novels, especially in EMMA and MANSFIELD PARK created the modern novel. And the modern novel did not really take hold until Romanticism had run its course. *****The paperback is small, portable and handsomely presented. Its addenda include a listing of the major characters in Austen's six novels, members of her family and names of her friends but, alas, no index. Throughout its text author Leithart scatters favorable and critical views of Jane Austen by such writers as Virginia Wolff, Sir Walter Scott and Mark Twain. I am puzzled that James Fenimore Cooper is not there, since his very first novel PRECAUTION (1820) is so clearly patterned, in part, on Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Still, a good, solid book provocative of thought and discussion. Good fodder, I should think, for book clubs. -OOO-