Fashionable Goodness

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:

• Why could Mr. Collins, a rector, afford to marry a poor woman, while Mr. Elton, a vicar, and Charles Hayter, a curate, could not?
• Why did Mansfield Park's early readers (unlike most today) love Fanny Price?
• What part did people of color, like Miss Lambe of Sanditon, play in English society?
• Why did Elizabeth Bennet compliment her kind sister Jane on her "candour"? 
• What shirked religious duties caused Anne Elliot to question the integrity of her cousin William Elliot?
• Which Austen characters exhibited "true honor," "false honor," or "no honor"?
• How did William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and William Cowper (beloved poet of Marianne Dashwood and Jane Austen) bring "goodness" into fashion?
• How did the French Revolution challenge England's complacency and draw the upper classes back to church?
• How did Christians campaigning to abolish the slave trade pioneer modern methods of working for social causes?

Explore the church of Jane Austen's world in Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen's England.

JANE AUSTEN'S CHURCH OF ENGLAND

1. Jane Austen's England, a Foreign Country

2. Jane Austen's Faith

3. Religious Faith in Austen's Novels

4. Church Livings in Pride and Prejudice

5. Church Livings in the Other Novels

6. The Country Clergyman's Life

7. The Country Clergyman's Wife

8. The Clergyman's Education

9. Worship and the Book of Common Prayer

10. The Country Clergyman's Work

11. Preachers Featured in Austen: From Blair to Fordyce

12. Psalms and Hymns: Singing in Church or Not

13. Churches, Chapels, Abbeys, and Cathedrals

14. Elopement, Adultery, and Divorce: Faith and the Community

15. Faith and Science: The Sublimity of Nature

CHALLENGES TO JANE AUSTEN'S CHURCH OF ENGLAND

16. Patronage and Multiple Livings: Nothing but a Country Curate

17. Serving God or Mammon: How Austen's Clergy Saw Their Duty

18. The Wesley Brothers and Whitefield: Waking Sleepy Churches

19. The Methodist Movement

20. Welcoming the Working Classes

21. Black England: Parishioners of Color

22. The Countess of Huntingdon: Reaching the Rich

23. Nonconformity: Religious Freedoms and Prejudices in Austen's England

24. Dissenters in Austen's Towns: Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and More

25. Evangelicals in the Church of England: Balancing Reason and Feeling

OUTREACH AND LEGACY

26. John Newton, Slave Trader Turned Preacher

27. William Cowper

28. William Wilberforce

29. Abolition

30. Making Goodness Fashionable

31. Hannah More

32. School on Sundays

33. The Horrors of the Prisons

34. Compassion like Emma's

35. The Word for the World

36. Missionary into Foreign Parts

37. Fathers and Mothers of the Victorians

Epilogue: Fingerprints of Jane Austen's Church on Today's World