Reading Jane Austen: A Novel Approach to Virtue

Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

In this episode, our focus is Jane Austen, and our guide is Karen Swallow Prior, one of our Trinity Forum Senior Fellows.

Karen explores the faith-informed perspective on virtue that Austen’s novels reflect:

"Underneath the surface [Austen] is inviting us to look at our own interactions with one another, our own misperceptions, and misreadings, and I think that’s really why her work has remained so endearing to us today; because she reveals the truths of our human condition that never change, and that we’re always wrestling with."

Jane Austen’s world and concerns seem distant from ours. Yet across the centuries, she illuminates the importance of the seemingly mundane, and the path towards repaired and rightly ordered relationships. 

If this work resonates with you, consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2021. You can find the full video of this conversation here. And while you’re here, please subscribe to this podcast.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility,   by Jane Austen
Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman
Praying with Jane, by Rachel Dodge  
Alasdair MacIntyre
William Shakespeare

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• Pride and Prejudice, a Trinity Forum Reading by Jane Austen
• Bulletins from Immortality, a Trinity Forum Reading by Emily Dickinson
• Revelation, a Trinity Forum Reading by Flannery O’Connor 
• God's Grandeur , a Trinity Forum Reading by Gerard Manley Hopkins