Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis, Laughter, & Lent

By |2024-03-11T21:37:40-05:00March 11th, 2024|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Jane Austen, Lent, Literature, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

C.S. Lewis' obscure essay, ‘A Note on Jane Austen,’ shows that it is Austen’s humor and humility that captures Lewis’ fancy and that directs us to a Lenten lesson. In his rule Saint Benedict advises that each monk should have a holy book to read during Lent. When searching for a holy book, we are [...]

Jane Austen Forever!

By |2023-12-15T18:08:48-06:00December 15th, 2023|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Books, Classics, Culture, Education, Fiction, Jane Austen, Literature, Television, Timeless Essays|

Pick up a Jane Austen novel, and you will discover that behind the long gowns and country dances, people in her era struggled with the same weaknesses we struggle with today. Well-written stories like Austen’s bring to life the human drama that is played out in every age, in every heart. I’ve been reading Jane [...]

Repentance and Regret: The Secret of Jane Austen’s Success

By |2023-07-17T22:45:33-05:00July 17th, 2023|Categories: Character, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Great Books, Jane Austen, Morality, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

The secret of Jane Austen’s genius is that she conceals the most serious of themes within light-hearted tales: true repentance and regret. Our own vanity and egotistical deceptions are revealed, and having been made self-aware, we stop and laugh and realize that our delight has filled us with light. Along with Granada Television’s Brideshead Revisited, [...]

Jane Austen and the Tudor Terror

By |2023-04-06T10:06:12-05:00April 5th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, England, History, Jane Austen, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors|

The indomitable Jane Austen has no love for “Bloody” Mary, but it’s intriguing and amusing that she sees her in the light, or should we say the shadow, of “Bloody” Bess, who would be her successor. There is no denying Jane Austen’s status as one of the greatest novelists of all time. Her works are [...]

On Being Conservative

By |2022-08-23T14:48:35-05:00August 23rd, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Family, Jane Austen, Marriage, Philosophy, Robert Nisbet, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

To be a conservative is first and foremost to defend or to conserve something good: to protect family, neighborhood, local community, and region. Louis de Bonald Of the many attempts to define conservatism in recent decades, one of the most compelling is Robert Nisbet’s: “The essence of this body of ideas is the protection [...]

The Perfection of Jane Austen

By |2023-05-21T11:28:52-05:00July 17th, 2022|Categories: Culture, E.B., Eva Brann, Jane Austen, Literature, Plato, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Jane Austen’s world is as merry as it is good. All the novels are perfect comedies—mirthful throughout and happy in outcome. Despite their brightness and lightness, these novels are in no way trivial—they are simply not concerned with those terrific follies presented to the scourge of public laughter in classical comic drama. Since this lecture [...]

Sensing the Dangers of Romantic Sensibility

By |2021-01-18T12:09:46-06:00January 19th, 2021|Categories: Great Books, Jane Austen, Literature, Love, Paul Krause, Reason, Senior Contributors|

“Sense and Sensibility” is a profound achievement of romantic realism. Jane Austen demonstrates that to surrender oneself to romantic sensibility is the highway to ruin, but that the unity of logos and eros is beautiful and wholesome. Jane Austen, to my mind, was the preeminent romantic realist writer. Born into a modest clerical family, she [...]

“Persuasion’s” Principles for Popping the Question

By |2023-07-18T00:15:06-05:00December 1st, 2020|Categories: David Deavel, Great Books, Jane Austen, Marriage, Morality, Senior Contributors|

Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” is the story of Anne Elliott, who has broken one engagement, rejected another, and is still single and pining after the man whom she would have married. Austen brings the theme of right marriage to perfection here: Nobility of heart and mind is more important than nobility of title and excess of [...]

The Feminine Genius of Jane Austen

By |2022-12-14T19:46:33-06:00August 15th, 2019|Categories: Culture, Great Books, History, Jane Austen, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors|

Jane Austen is more than a giantess among women writers. She is also a giantess among the giants, holding a place of pride and prominence among the greatest writers of either sex and of all ages. She doesn’t merely tower above George Elliot, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and the Brontë sisters, she also towers above [...]

The Nature of Marital Happiness in “Pride & Prejudice”

By |2023-07-18T13:06:45-05:00July 23rd, 2019|Categories: Character, Great Books, Happiness, Jane Austen, Literature, Marriage|

In “Pride and Prejudice,” Elizabeth Bennet is vehement that the character of the person must be determined in order to make a good choice. While spouses may change over time in superficial ways, the essentials remain constant. While one may hope for the conversion of a scoundrel or a fool, it is not worth banking [...]

The Moral Imagination & Imaginative Conservatism

By |2023-07-09T09:44:07-05:00July 17th, 2019|Categories: Books, E.B., Edmund Burke, Eva Brann, Imagination, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Jane Austen, Moral Imagination, Senior Contributors, St. John's College|

Moral imagination runs not incidentally but necessarily in tandem with a certain aspect of conservatism, what I think of as imaginative conservatism. The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (259 pages, Ivan R. Dee, 2006) The Moral Imagination is a very engaging collection of a dozen essays on a dozen authors [...]

If Shakespeare Was a Woman, Might Jane Austen Have Been a Man?

By |2019-06-01T22:41:22-05:00June 1st, 2019|Categories: Books, Culture, Jane Austen, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors, Shakespearian Authorship, William Shakespeare|

We live in a mad, mad world where anything goes and many things have gone. One of the things that appears to have gone is a sense of sanity. Take, for instance, a recent essay in The Atlantic which claims to show that William Shakespeare was in fact a woman.[*] The essay itself, which was written [...]

Great Books I Wouldn’t Want to Be In (And Some I Would!)

By |2021-04-22T18:12:42-05:00April 26th, 2019|Categories: Books, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Great Books, Homer, Jane Austen, Mark Twain|

It is interesting that at least half the great books I considered for this list were stories I would not want to enter, but loved reading. Literature allows us to gain a breadth of experience our own circumstances would not permit and at very little expense to us… If there’s something book lovers like almost [...]

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