January 2025
“I first met Jane Austen in September 1986. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t much like her,” begins the introduction to Rachel Mann’s 2023 book, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 40 Days with Jane Austen.
Mann, a visiting scholar at Sarum College, will be appearing with author and Sarum MA graduate Paula Hollingsworth, to discuss the spirituality of Jane Austen at the Church Times Festival of Faith & Literature next month. Hollingsworth is the author of The Spirituality of Jane Austen (2017), the subject of her master’s thesis from Sarum College.
Their discussion will be chaired by leading cultural historian of the Victorian age Professor Michael Wheeler on Friday 28 February at 4pm in Winchester Cathedral.
Reading Austen’s novel Emma in English Literature A Level didn’t raise Mann’s esteem of the author either. “Indeed,” Mann writes, “50 pages into Emma I was ready to give up. As far as my arrogant teenaged self could see, Austen’s writing was lightweight. She was only interested in romance and in social contexts that were far outside anything I cared about. After those first 50 pages, I was convinced that Jane Austen wrote Mills and Boon stories for posh people.”
She has, of course changed her mind. “I now think that Jane Austen had a rarely matched insight into human character and our abiding human problems. Austen exposes human frailty, caprice and pomposity while ultimately inviting us into hopeful and joyous visions of human relationships and society. In the midst of familiar passages, there are moments of surprise and unexpected challenges. I trust also that she will lead us, as readers, deeper into an appreciation of the absurdities as well as the glories of being human.”
“[Austen] writes of clergy in her novels with great ease because she mixed naturally with them from her earliest days and she knew and instinctively understood the world of a village rector and the role of the church in a village community,” Hollingsworth says. “Austen’s father was a village parson, as later was her brother James. I hope that we will see in her writings a demanding genius, as well as a creativity that challenges us to treat more honestly both ourselves and the living God.”
Hollingsworth’s book explores Jane Austen’s gentle but strong faith and the effect it had both on her life and her writing. She shows the depth of Austen’s spirituality by drawing on the author’s life story, her letters, her friendships, her books and the characters portrayed.
For tickets and further details visit the festival website
A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 40 days with Jane Austen by Rachel Mann, Canterbury Press, 2023.
The Spirituality of Jane Austin by Paula Hollingsworth, Lion Hudson Plc, 2017
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