Please join us at the Bluffton Library as JASNA-South Carolina co-sponsors with the Friends of the Bluffton Library our next JASNA-SC meeting:
“Why Mr. Collins? The Church and Clergy in Jane Austen’s Novels”
About the Talk:
Jane Austen had a high regard for the church. Why, then, did she present Mr. Collins as a buffoon? Why was he so deferential to Lady Catherine? (He had good reasons.) Did he fail in his duties, as Edmund Bertram of Mansfield Park tells us some clergymen did? We’ll explore Mr. Collins’s words, actions, and character, including his marriage proposal, comparing him to Austen’s other clergymen, satirical cartoons of the time, and Anglican and Evangelical ideals.
About the Book:
The Church of England was at the heart of Jane Austen’s world of elegance and upheaval. Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen’s England explores the church’s role in her life and novels, the challenges that church faced, and how it changed the world. In one volume, this book brings together resources from many sources to show the church at a pivotal time in history, when English Christians were freeing enslaved people, empowering the poor and oppressed, and challenging society’s moral values and immoral behavior.
Readers will meet Anglicans, Dissenters, Evangelicals, women leaders, poets, social reformers, hymn writers, country parsons, authors, and more. Lovers of Jane Austen or of church history and the long eighteenth century will enjoy discovering all this and much more, as Cox explains the many questions surrounding Austen’s clergyman characters.
About the Speaker:
Brenda S. Cox lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She came across a copy of Emma as a young mom, and enjoyed it so much that she immediately bought a volume including all of Austen’s works. She has loved Jane Austen ever since. About twelve years ago she began researching the church in Austen’s England. She found there was no single, accessible book that answered all her questions. So she spent about ten years researching, and wrote the book, Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen’s England. It explores connections between Austen’s work, her Church of England, and prominent events and people in English Christianity at the time. Brenda writes for Jane Austen’s World, her own blog, Faith, Science, Joy, and Jane Austen, and the magazine Jane Austen’s Regency World. She has spoken on Austen and the church to Jane Austen groups in Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand, and various parts of the US.
The Bluffton Library in located at
120 Palmetto Way, Bluffton, SC
Questions? email jasnasouthcarolina@gmail.com
Hope you can join us!
This year we commemorate Jane Austen’s death. We certainly do not celebrate it. We feel a sense of unfairness about it, not only for our selfish sake–for being cheated out of, based on the lifespan of her parents and most of her siblings, thirty or forty years’ worth of Jane Austen novels–but naturally for Jane’s own sake. She died just before she would have reached real success–the success enjoyed by her contemporaries such as Burney, Radcliffe, and Edgeworth, all of whom she has utterly eclipsed in the intervening centuries. It is just horribly unfair. Jane gave the world such joy and never really had the opportunity to enjoy real fruits from her labor (by which we mean money. From what we can tell, Austen was never big on the whole adulation thing).
Jane Austen in Vermont 
