Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England

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 neoclassical 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.