Jane Austen and Religion

Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's six published novels against the background of a "long 18th century" that stretched from the Restoration to the Regency. He demonstrates that Austen is a neo-classical author of the Enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. Giffin's focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation and reflection on experience.