Please join us for our next meeting at the Bluffton Library, 120 Palmetto Way, Bluffton, SC!

JASNA-SC and the Friends of the Bluffton Library
November 16, 2024, 2-4 pm
at the Bluffton Library

“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 various parts of the US.

Hope you can join us!

c2024JaneAustenSocietySouthCarolina