Praying with Jane Austen

From Elizabeth Bennet to Emma, Jane Austen’s heroines often consider their own character then change. As the anniversary of the novelist’s birth approaches, Beatrice Scudeler explores their author's prayers.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A head and shoulders portrait of a young woman inclining her gaze to one side.

Portrait of a Young Woman in White, 1798, Jacques-Louis David.

In his essay ‘A Note on Jane Austen’, C. S. Lewis argues that the heroines in each major Austen novel go through a process which he terms ‘undeception’, leading them to ‘discover that they have been making mistakes both about themselves and about the world in which they live.’ This can take the form of self-analysis, or of a more explicitly Christian examination of conscience. Elizabeth Bennet or Catherine Moreland may not be constantly described praying, for instance, but they certainly engage in a healthy amount of self-examination. On the other hand, we have a much more explicitly Christian example of repentance in the character of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, who, after her abandonment by Mr. Willoughby, and having just recovered from a dangerous illness, confesses to her sister that is grateful to have been given the chance to repent and ‘have time for atonement to my God.’ But what about Austen herself? What was the role of self-examination in her own life?

I got my answer earlier this year, when my husband and I went on a Jane Austen prayer retreat at the charming vicarage of Edenham, Lincolnshire. When not engaged in prayer, we spent our time learning about and discussing Austen’s faith, which she practised devoutly throughout her life as the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Austen’s life was immersed in prayer.

According to Fr. Ed Martin, who hosted the retreat, the Austens would have read through all of the Old Testament once in a year, the New Testament twice in a year, and the Psalms once each month. What’s more, Fr. Ed estimated that, once personal devotion and church services were accounted for, Austen would have prayed the Lord’s prayer about 30,000 times over her the course of her life.

I was also delighted to learn more about one of only twenty books that we know with certainty to have been in Austen’s personal collection – A Companion to the Altar by William Vickers. Austen’s copy, signed 1794, resides at the Princeton University Library; according to Irene Collins, whose book Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter (1998) I highly recommend, Austen made regular use of Vickers’ book, which was meant as a guide for Anglicans to prepare themselves spiritually to receive Holy Communion.

I was intrigued to read A Companion to the Altar for myself. What stood out to me is Vickers’ emphasis on self-examination and repentance as crucial to one’s spiritual life, especially leading up to Sundays when a communion service was going to happen. This struck me as being very much in keeping with the experience of the heroines in Austen’s novels which Lewis details in his essay on Austen.

These three prayers also reveal that, for Austen, the key to a virtuous life resides not in blindly sticking to a set of moral rules, but rather in cultivating one’s character.

While thinking about these ideas of examination of conscience and repentance, I was reminded that, thanks to her sister Cassandra, three of Jane Austen’s own prayers have survived. They were penned by Austen as an adult, judging by the handwriting, and would have been written for the purpose of personal or family devotion, especially on a Sunday evening. These three prayers, though brief, reflect – and even clarify – so many of the issues that Austen returns to again and again in her novels: the danger of pride, the necessity of repentance and humility, and more generally, a call to lead a virtuous life. For example, in the third prayer she writes:

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 all they say and do with that charity which we would desire from them ourselves.

This passage could have been written for Emma Woodhouse herself! After the disastrous trip to Box Hill, where she deeply embarrasses Miss Bates in front of their friends, we are told that the normally confident and even haughty Emma admits that ‘She had often been remiss, her conscience told her so’ and, after much reflection, she experiences ‘the warmth of true contrition.’ Nor does this call to humility apply solely to Austen’s female characters.

While Lewis does not extend his concept of ‘undeception’ to Austen’s heroes, this is clearly what happens to Mr. Darcy by the end of Pride and Prejudice, so much so that, once he has realised the extent of his past pride, he tells Elizabeth, ‘By you, I was properly humbled.’ Similarly, in Persuasion Captain Wentworth admits to Anne Elliot that if he had not been ‘too proud’, their separation need not have been so long, and they might have been able to get married and begin a life together much sooner.

These three prayers also reveal that, for Austen, the key to a virtuous life resides not in blindly sticking to a set of moral rules, but rather in cultivating one’s character, starting by training one’s disposition through habitual practice of certain key virtues like charity, patience, and humility. As Alasdair Macintyre notes in his seminal philosophical work After Virtue (1981), Jane Austen follows ancient philosopher Aristotle in thinking that ‘Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways.’ Therefore, a moral education is not simply about doing what’s right whether you feel like it or not. Rather, it’s an ‘education sentimentale’: it’s about becoming morally mature enough to do the right thing not because you have to, but because you want to. Let me quote here a key passage from the first surviving prayer, in which Austen is asking God for forgiveness and guidance:

Look with Mercy on the Sins we have this day committed, and in Mercy make us feel them deeply, that our Repentance may be sincere, & our resolutions steadfast of endeavouring against the commission of such in future. Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own Hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of Temper and every evil Habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own Souls. May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent by us, what have been our prevailing Thoughts, Words, and Actions during it, and how far we can acquit ourselves of Evil. Have we thought irreverently of Thee, have we disobeyed thy commandments, have we neglected any known duty, or willingly given pain to any human being? Incline us to ask our Hearts these questions Oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity.

Everything about Austen’s petitions to God in this prayer revolves around the formation of a virtuous character. First of all, she wishes that her ‘repentance’ may be ‘sincere’, and her ‘resolutions’ to lead a more virtuous life ‘steadfast.’ But how are we to achieve such sincere repentance? For Austen, it is through the examination of our disposition. She invites God to bring to her knowledge ‘every fault of Temper and every evil Habit’ in which she has ‘indulged’. As you can see, the focus here is not on resolving never to do one specific ‘bad’ thing again; rather, it is on getting rid of bad habits, so that you will not even be tempted to do that bad thing in the future. This becomes even clearer in the final section I quoted: ‘Incline us to ask our Hearts these questions Oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity.’ Achieving virtue is a matter of a sentimental education, in the sense of having the right feelings; for Austen, a devout Christian, this can only happen with God’s aid. Both Lewis and Macintyre, then, got it right. Lewis is right that Jane Austen is deeply concerned with the fictions which we tell ourselves, and which lead us away from goodness. She asks God to save her from ‘deceiving’ herself by ‘Pride’ and, like Lewis shows, whenever one of her heroines falls precisely into this trap, a process of ‘undeception’ always takes place. But Macintyre is also right in pointing out that undeception cannot take place until we train our ‘Hearts’, not just our heads, into a habit of virtue.

What both Macintyre and Lewis guessed from Austen’s novels, we can experience and understand more directly by reading Austen’s prayers. We learn from her direct addresses to God how seriously she took the sin of pride, and how highly the virtue of humility ranked for her. We learn that no true repentance can happen without regular self-examination and confidence in God’s forgiveness. We learn that true virtue can only be gained through habit, and that constancy in practising virtues like humility and charity is crucial, even in the face of our own mistakes. If you are already someone of faith, I urge you to read Austen’s prayers and make use of them in your prayer life. If you don’t consider yourself a Christian, I urge you to read her prayers nonetheless: you may find they help you on your way to the kind of self-examination, without which none of Austen’s heroes or heroines could have achieved happiness.

Article

Attention

Culture

Weirdness

Wildness

26 November 2024

6 min read

Take a walk: the world is weirder than you think it is

Psychogeography and the dark alleyways of the mind.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

A backlit person at twilight holds a hand out towards the camera, holding some fairly lights

Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash.

This article, by Blake Collier, first appeared in Mockingbird. Published by kind permission.

Entre chien et loup.

The phrase literally means “between dog and wolf” and has most immanently been used to describe the twilight hour where day and night intermingle before night fully takes hold.

Jean Pruvost, a linguist who has studied the expression, gave some background on ‘entre chien et loup.’ He says it comes from a Latin phrase, intra hora vespertina inter canem et lupum, that dates back to at least the seventh century. And it refers to the time when the daylight dims and you could mistake a dog for a wolf.

One could imagine before the advent of electricity and modern public lighting how ambiguous this time of day could be as the landscapes around your small village were being consumed by the darkness — the human eye not fully able to calibrate fully for day or for night, hence the inability to distinguish between a friendly pet and a looming threat.

This is what is popularly known as liminal space in our current epoch. This liminality is always present, however, not just at dusk. As we move through the worlds we inhabit, whether natural or built, we are constantly finding ourselves within transition or transformation. Psychogeography is a broader term that is often used to investigate the liminal movement of bodies through space. In its most simplistic form, it is how our mind interacts with and processes the physical landscapes that we inhabit and how those landscapes affect our mind. The actual history of the term is much more complicated — honestly, convoluted — however at its core it is scratching at the nebulosity of things like entre chien et loup.

At the outskirts of a city or town, one begins to see the fraying of the edges, those areas where we have yet to fully enact our illusory control over the land.

About seven or eight years ago at the height of my running prowess, I got up one Friday morning very early and started a ten-mile run I had planned around nearly the full border of my hometown of Canyon, Texas. I did not know if I would make it the whole way, but the intent was there and the map was set. However, something interesting happened as I began plodding down my route. Those lines that show up on our maps often engender varying qualities of trails. Most of the time I was hitting asphalt and sidewalks, but when you are following a broad circle around a town, it’s not uncommon to find ambiguous stretches between incorporated and unincorporated parts of the town. Somewhere within the first mile or two, one of the “roads” I had included on my path ended up being nothing more than a worn trail through prairieland behind a group of houses.

I bring this story up because, though I did not know it then, I was enacting a psychogeographic practice. Iain Sinclair, who is probably one of the most well-known proponents of modern psychogeography, walked the M25 around London in seven different treks over a time period. The M25 is a 125-mile loop around London and is considered one of the busiest highways in the world. As he ambled along the highway — sometimes on asphalt, sometime “around” the trace of the highway — he would take note of what he saw, and he eventually wrote the book London Orbital. This practice allowed him to see London in a new way because at the outskirts of a city or town, one begins to see the fraying of the edges, those areas where we have yet to fully enact our illusory control over the land. They have neither been captured by urban sprawl nor have they been renovated and gentrified. These lacunae are ambiguous regions between the built and unbuilt (or decayed). Once again, we are placing ourselves intentionally into places where we attend to the ley lines which connect the physical markers to the perceived or imagined topographies of the places where we exist.

To put it bluntly, being intentionally attentive to surroundings can trigger investigations into the seen and unseen powers that hole up in our built environments and the natural world that pushes back against it.

The path through the prairieland I spoke of earlier ended at a concrete curb and a recently repaved residential street that ran right next to a Catholic church, almost like the church was posting itself on the fringes of the town to warn of impending threat, or perhaps giving a welcome sight to a weary traveler. I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

Yet it is exactly this work of attending to where we live and reacquainting ourselves with it that is, I believe, at the heart of this purposeful ambulation through space. Our lives fall into banality most of the time. We take everything for granted and we see our lived environment through that myopic lens. But take a walk on the outskirts of where you live, without a phone or music or any other technological mediation, and just look around the space and pay attention to how it embroils your emotions. I can nearly guarantee that you will find the place you live is much weirder than you thought it was, and you might even learn a thing or two about what your place values. I knew that Catholic church was in that general area of that path, but I didn’t realize how that path would empty me out before its hallowed presence.

However, as I thought about it, it made sense that in this community the Catholic church would be found on the edges of the town. There are somewhere around ten other churches in a town of about 17,000 all of which are Protestant. However, if you go just ten or eleven miles west to the town of Umbarger, the roles are reversed. There is still one Catholic church, but as far as I know no Protestant churches. Merlin Coverley, in his book tracing the history of psychogeography, finds that “contemporary psychogeography as closely resembles a form of local history as it does a geographical exploration.” One could take the observations from their ambulation and dig into their place’s past to see why this might be the case. However, this is very much the chien of this psychological study of environment.

What about the loup? Psychogeography has always had connections to the occult and the weird. Coverley continues later in his book,

“Here, then, we find all the features ascribed to psychogeography today: the mental traveler who remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination is allied to the urban wanderer who drifts through the city streets; the political radicalism that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day is tempered by the awareness of the city as eternal and unchanging; and the use of occult symbolism reflects the precedence given to the subjective and the anti-rational over more systematic modes of thought.”

All of this is to say that what we might find out about the place we live in when we give ourselves to its fringes and walk its shores might have a darker tone which implicates local politics and powers. Perhaps we will even find ourselves confronted by a metamorphosis which changes the very way we live, work, and move in these places.

Sinclair’s earlier work Lud Heat in 1975 set out to remap London by way of connecting London’s churches built by eighteenth-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and their odd loci to numerous prominent murders like the Radcliffe Highway Murders and those by Jack the Ripper. There is a thread that ties some of the imagery Hawksmoor used in his churches to ancient Pagan symbolism. To put it bluntly, being intentionally attentive to surroundings can trigger investigations into the seen and unseen powers that hole up in our built environments and the natural world that pushes back against it.

If nothing else, this study of the ambiguous transgressions between mind and place helps us bring a new profundity to our existence. It psychologically brings us back to a place where our intellectual, physical, and technological prowess cannot protect us from the hairs that stand on the back of our necks. Because everything, if attended to perceptively, can be seen as a dog or a wolf. And that should give us great pause in the everyday grind of our lives.