Jane
Peter Leithart hasn’t mentioned it yet on his blog, but First Things recently published his article “Jane Austen, Public Theologian.” Most of the essay focuses on Mansfield Park. Here’s a sample:
Austen was not an unthinking defender of traditional social order. Not uncommonly, her heroines are upwardly mobile, particularly through the agency of matrimony. Yet she sensed the corrosive effects of individualism, and her uncanny intelligence and attention to the details of social surface enabled her to give us one of literature’s sharpest portraits of this emerging reality. That she also recognized the absence and failure of the Church in combating this decay makes her a public theologian to reckon with.
If you like Austen (and this includes you, Gideon), this ought to whet your appetite for Peter’s Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen, forthcoming (someday) from Canon Press.