Austen on Prayer

IN THE 250th anniversary of her birth, Jane Austen’s reputation has never been higher. But what would surprise many devotees is the depth of Austen’s Christian faith, especially her deep prayerfulness. This may even be news to many of her fans. But Christian prayer was at the core of who she was and the books she wrote. And Austen offers us considerable resources for our prayer, not least the prayers she wrote.

Posted Date : 2025-11-26 18:30:00

Public Domain

By David Goodhew

IN THE 250th anniversary of her birth, Jane Austen’s reputation has never been higher. But what would surprise many devotees is the depth of Austen’s Christian faith, especially her deep prayerfulness. This may even be news to many of her fans. But Christian prayer was at the core of who she was and the books she wrote. And Austen offers us considerable resources for our prayer, not least the prayers she wrote.

 

Pride and Prejudice and Prayer

Pride and Prejudice is Austen’s best-known novel. It is routinely treated as a rom-com. But beneath the surface is a spiritual skeleton that gives shape to the narrative.

“After morning service” is a small phrase in the opening chapters of the novel, but it says much. Habitual worship is a given for the leading characters. Later, the novel references Darcy’s attendance at Good Friday worship. Even in the Regency period, this was a sign of serious faith. His “God bless you” to the woman he dearly loves, who has spurned his offer of marriage, embodies a growth in Christian humility and grace.

And Darcy works to ensure that the dissolute, amoral Wickham is blocked from taking up a clerical career. Darcy, famous as a lover, here acts like a conscientious bishop, weeding out those unsuited to ordained ministry. Darcy was dashing, but he was also devout.

Wickham and Lydia Bennet are the villains of this tale. Their self-centred amorality is underpinned by indifference or flippancy towards things spiritual. By contrast, Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet express a quiet, deeply Anglican faith that helps them grow through hardship.

The hilarious, repulsive cleric, Mr. Collins, is what most readers remember of faith in this book. But Collins’ censorious condemnation of Lydia and Wickham is condemned by Mr. Bennet as un-Christian.

By contrast, Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, by their gracious care for the (now married) Lydia and Wickham, exemplify the practice of Christian forgiveness that Collins ought to show and does not. Part of the humour in Pride and Prejudice is that laypeople, not the cleric, show how to live in Christian faith.

Austen depicts Collins as a figure of fun, but the faith Collins is supposed to represent is treated with complete seriousness. And this can be seen most clearly in Mansfield Park, the novel in which Austen gives the most space to prayer.

 

Austen’s Prayer Book

Mansfield Park is the most serious of Austen’s novels, and prayer is at its heart.

In a key scene, the characters visit Sotherton, a country house. They enter the house’s private chapel and realize that it is unused. This leads to a debate. Edmund and Fanny urge the renewal of prayer at Sotherton. Mary Crawford sees the neglect of prayer as no bad thing.

Mary comments that “it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way.” Corporate worship is, to her, constraint. Mary is the voice of modern individualism. Edmund responds that the person who spurns corporate worship is likely to spurn any constraint on their behavior – a judgment that later events in the novel prove correct.

Austen didn’t directly address atheism as a belief system, but she was withering about the operative atheism – as visible in her day as ours – that neglected prayer and left everything to the whim of the individual. In Austen’s fiction, the heroes (Elizabeth and Darcy, Elinor and Marianne, Emma and Knightley, Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, Edmund and Fanny) are people of prayer. It is the villains (Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford and Mr Elliot) who give little or no heed to the practice of prayer.

In Mansfield Park, Austen sees prayer in a stately home as that home’s animating force. She sees the neglect of prayer as deadening the life of a great house and corroding the characters of its inhabitants. Neglect of prayers in its chapel means the house losing its soul. In Mansfield Park she sets the practice of prayer at the heart of every Christian’s calling, lay or ordained.

 

Austen’s Faith

Austen spent the first 25 years of her life living in her father’s rectory in rural Hampshire. She deeply loved and was profoundly shaped by her father, George Austen. George Austen, in turn, was a conscientious parish priest. The parish registers for the many years of his ministry show a dedicated rural clergyman. George Austen wrote a letter of advice to his sailor son, Francis, knowing that he would likely not see Francis for years and possibly never again. The letter gives great prominence to prayer:

The first & most important of all considerations to a human Being is Religion, or the belief of a God & our consequent duty to him, our Neighbour, & ourselves – In each of these your Catechism instructs you … as you must be well convinced how wholly you depend on God for success in all your undertakings, you will easily see that you are bound in interest as well as duty regularly to address yourself to him in Prayer, Night & Morning; thankfully acknowledging the Blessings you have received already & humbly beseeching his future favour & protection. Now this is a Duty which nothing can excus[e t]he omission of times of the greatest hurry will not hinder a well dis[pose]d mind from fulfilling it – for a short Ejaculation to the Almig[ht]y, when it comes from the heart will be as acceptable to him as the most elegant & studied form of Words. (Brackets indicate parts of the letter that were damaged.) [i]

George Austen was widely and well-read, careful to foster the intellect of his daughters as well as his sons, and ran a relaxed, urbane rectory. George Austen’s faith was fundamental to who he was. The advice he impressed on his son would have been impressed on Jane just as seriously.

Jane Austen turned to prayer at the most difficult times in her life. In Austen’s frequent encounters with grief and those grieving, there is a consistent leaning on faith, as when she asks for the following message to be passed to her bereaved brother Edward: “tell Edward that we feel for him and pray for him.”

In her illness and dying, she consistently leaned into faith. Austen’s family erected a gravestone that focused on her faith and character and gave limited mention to her literary achievements. Modern scholars are wont to reprove her family for so doing. Jane Austen most likely would have valued their assessment of her.

And it was thoroughly Anglican prayer. Expressed through the Book of Common Prayer, Jane Austen’s prayer was primarily Morning and Evening Prayer. But she was careful also to be a regular communicant. Preaching was something she took seriously. Whilst she had no time for cant or, in her eyes, excessive emotionalism, she expected serious wrestling with serious matters from her preachers. She habitually attended church twice on Sundays. And if unable to attend on Sunday evenings, she insisted that a modified form of Evening Prayer was to be said at home. She saw Sunday morning worship as essential to life, to be foregone only with great reluctance.

 

Austen as a Writer of Prayers

Austen thought hard about prayer and she wrote prayers, which is often passed over. These prayers are not great literary achievements, but they tell us much about Austen’s spiritual life.

These prayers use prayer book language, have a primarily evening setting, are communal in nature, and likely reflect the context of family prayers (and it seems likely that Austen was in the habit of daily family prayers each evening).

Austen’s prayers are rooted in prayer book theology and language. There is deep dependence on God, and awareness of human sinfulness and the need for divine mercy. The scholar Bruce Stovel notes that “the difficulty and yet the necessity of self-knowledge is the principal theme in Jane Austen’s prayers.”[ii] Alongside this is the seeking of greater charity in actions and thoughts towards others – a theme echoed in many of Austen’s heroines, from Elizabeth Bennet to Emma Woodhouse to Marianne Dashwood.

Austen prays at one point:

Incline us Oh God! to think humbly of ourselves, to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct, to consider our fellow-creatures with kindness, and to judge of all they say and do with that charity which we would desire from them ourselves.

Stovel argues convincingly that this is a summary of Austen’s moral thinking.

Prayer book collects have been analyzed as having a fivefold structure: Salutation, Ascription, Petition, Reason for Petition, and Conclusion. Austen’s prayers follow this same structure. Austen’s prayers are those of one aware of her failings – hence reference to repentance for the sins of unkind words and thoughts that, as someone with a biting wit and sharp powers of description, she knew to be a temptation. Near the heart of Emma is the way a gifted, witty, intellectual woman realized how crushing she could be to those less articulate and more vulnerable than herself. Austen’s prayers show she knew she could be guilty of the same faults.

Austen interceded readily, and the troubles of her life are reflected in her surviving prayers – with intercession for those at sea (mindful of her sailor brothers), of those unwell (in an age of much sickness) and orphans (mindful of various nieces and nephews whose parents died when they were young).

 

Conclusions

On the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, much is, rightly, being made of her. But all too often, contemporary observers project onto Austen only what they want to see. Filmmakers and other contemporary media usually show a colonial attitude to Austen. Her voice is appropriated to echo the platitudes of contemporary thought. And her voice is silenced when she speaks of matters they would prefer not to hear, as with Austen’s deep Christian prayerfulness. The actors in these movies, TV, and radio programs do many things – but prayer is rarely one of them.

Jane Austen’s novels make limited explicit references to prayer. But they presuppose prayer. Austen’s prayerfulness has to be recovered if her books are to be understood. One cannot make sense of these fantastic works unless one factors in the prayer that lies within and beneath them. Not the least of the ways modern Western readers make fools of ourselves is by assuming Austen was as secular as is our age. She was not.

Austen provides a path to grow in prayer. Austen gives us an example of steadiness in prayer; of prayer that is thought through yet heartfelt. Austen’s prayer was vertical in its desire for God and horizontal in seeking the outworking of faith in active compassion. By her steadfast faith in the troubles she faced, she gives us encouragement to lean into God in the struggles we face. Austen prayed through and in the Anglican tradition. Just as she fed spirituality on Anglicanism, so she can feed Anglican prayer today.

Jane Austen loathed self-display, not least pious self-display. But she believed profoundly in Christian prayer as fundamental to being fully human, to knowing God and growing in grace. Careful study of her novels and her life reaps rich literary rewards, but also rich spiritual rewards.   TAP

The Rev. Dr. David Goodhew is vicar of St. Barnabas Church, Middlesbrough, England, and visiting fellow of St John’s College, Durham University. This essay first appeared in Covenant, the online journal of The Living Church.

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[i] For a detailed discussion of George Austen’s advice to his son, see Brenda Cox, “George Austen’s Spiritual Advice to His Son Francis Austen,”www.janeaustensworld.com.

[ii] Bruce Stovel, “‘A Nation Improving in Religion’: Jane Austen’s Prayers and Their Place in Her Life and Art,” Persuasions 16, 1994. See also “‘The Sentient Target of Death’: Jane Austen’s Prayers,” in Jane Austen’s Business: Her World and Her Profession, ed. Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel (Macmillan Press, 1995).

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