Jane Austen and the Economy of Salvation

Austen is often thought of as a secular author, because religion seems absent from her novels and she satirises her clerical characters. Also, the reader's sensibility (shaped by academic literary criticism) is overwhelmingly secular.

Michael Giffin offers a religious reading of Austen's novels against the background of a long eighteenth century that stretched from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period.

He demonstrates how Austen writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. His focus is on how her novels mirror a belief in natural law and reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation, and reflection on experience.

His reading suggests a thread of theology running through Austen's novels, best understood in its cultural context.