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

Culture

Generosity

Virtues

4 June 2025

6 min read

We need to rescue volunteering

Our use of the word now reflects unwanted obligations, rather than a deep desire to serve.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

Two small lifeboats raft together on a river rescue.

Lifeboats on the River Thames.

x.com/rnli_teddington

It’s a hot summer evening and there are 30 of us sweating in our dry suits. Tuesdays usually mean lifeboat training, but this night is a little different. An intermission from the usual intensity of a team-building exercise: racing two lifeboats across the river Thames. Allocated into teams of two rowing in a knockout tournament, we are going to be here for a while. Our cheers provide the soundtrack for the BBC radio crew recording a programme on volunteering. The mood is convivial; the competition is fierce. None of us have to be here; all of us choose to be. We are a lifeboat crew, and we are all volunteers.

Around 25 million people in the UK do some form of volunteering. And they are celebrated during Volunteers’ Week, which has been running for 41 years. The benefits are well documented these days. The mental and physical health boost. A sense of purpose. The chance to learn new skills. A route to forging connections with other people.

Despite this, though, the number of people volunteering has been on a twenty-year decline. One in three organisations are struggling to retain volunteers, in part due to the cost-of-living crisis making people’s time and capacity more precious than ever.

Beyond that, our use of the word seems to have shifted to reflect unwanted obligations, rather than a deeply held desire to serve. ‘I suppose I better volunteer to put out the chairs’ we might pronounce with the deathly weight of Katniss Everdeen’s ‘I volunteer as tribute,’ glancing to the left and the right in case anyone saves us from the undesirable task. It seems the very idea of volunteering needs rescue.

It wasn’t on my radar to be lifeboat crew, but an unexpected new job in an unfamiliar London suburb unlocked this possibility. When I considered ‘Why wouldn’t I?’, I couldn’t find a strong reason. So, one autumn evening I trekked down for my first Tuesday night at Teddington lifeboat station. It was time to fill in the paperwork: I was officially a volunteer.

Over the months that followed, I found myself wondering why other people gave their time, energy and skills to complete the nearly 50 training modules and to be available 24/7 when someone on the water was in need. I hungered for people’s stories, to know why they kept answering the call when their beds were warm and the night was unknown. So, over the four years that I was on the crew, I asked them. I spoke with teachers and students, company directors and full-time parents. I heard stories of multiple generations on a crew, their family’s blood running orange and blue. One woman spoke of overcoming her fear of heights to scale the side of a boat; another had an unexpected tale of a dolphin attack. Each time, I had the same question: why do you do it?

And I was struck by the fact that none of them gave an answer that fully added up. They could name parts of it: care for people, teamwork, a love of the sea. Sometimes of the reasons they started (‘Dad did it’) were not why they stayed on (‘I could make a palpable difference’). I didn’t meet anyone who didn’t enjoy being on the water. Play and peril can co-exist – and we need to have moments of joy along the way if we’re going to be in it for the long haul. But in each case, the answers always seemed to come up a little short. If I was looking for something neat and complete, I wasn’t finding it.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby. At some point, volunteering will cost you something.

Back on the river, the knockout races are suddenly interrupted. A call from the coastguard: there’s a person in difficulty in the river. The mood switch is instantaneous; the action swings from contesting to collaborating to get a boat headed upstream as fast as possible. Somewhere, someone is having a very bad day. This is what we exist for.

The RNLI was born out of a need. In the early nineteenth century, nearly 2,000 ships – and their crews – were being wrecked on British and Irish coasts every year. Sir William Hillary saw this loss firsthand from his home on the Isle of Man, joining with others to rescue as many as possible – but it wasn’t enough. People continued to perish. So, he rallied other activists and philanthropists, and in a London pub, the charity now called the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was formed. Hillary’s motto, 'with courage, nothing is impossible’, can still be found adorning lifeboat stations around the country.

None of the lifeboat crew members that I met seemed to think of themselves as anything but ordinary. They were full of admiration in the stories of fellow crew mates, but saw themselves as entirely human, naming everyday needs and familiar comforts. Writing about courage, Andrew Davison recognised that,

‘The willingness of a courageous person to forgo ease, safety, the comforts of home, and even to risk life and limb, does not spring from hatred of any of those things’.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby (also commendable for its health benefits, sense of purpose, opportunities for connection). At some point, volunteering will cost you something. That sacrifice is needed demonstrates the level of care; otherwise, it’s simply another act of self-actualisation in the service of the volunteer themselves.

It’s dark on the river and the boat crew is still out. The BBC’s team has packed up for the evening. We have tidied the station, no evidence of the antics of hours earlier. We depart. Close to midnight, those of us who can, return. We bring the boat in from the water, and make it ready for the next call, which will inevitably come. One less job for those who’ve been on duty all evening. It’s the least we can do.

In the origins of the term is a spirit of offering. The Latin voluntaries carries a sense of ‘to give of one’s free will’. This, perhaps, is where we’ve lost our way with the whole idea. For there to be a sense of duress in volunteering is to strip the generous act of its power. Where there is obligation on one side and self-interest on the other, we can find the middle ground marked by devotion, by having chosen to serve and therefore having the commitment to see it through. This is the invitation that volunteering can offer us, and that I glimpsed from people who had been volunteering on the lifeboats for decades.

Writing to the sea-faring city of Ephesus in ancient Greece, the church leader Paul encouraged people to ‘submit to one another’, which is another way of saying sacrificially help each other. In smaller coastal communities, a lifeboat crew might be called out to save a family member. In London, a city of millions, it will always be a stranger. But either way the decision was the same: to show up. The reasons why we do it don’t always add up. There are flavours of compassion, of wanting to be useful, to be part of something bigger. But there seems to be something else as well. A dedication to meeting a need. Put another way, we might call it love.

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