Jane Austen and the Reformation: Remembering the Sacred Landscape by Roger E. Moore (review)

Roger E. Moore draws his reader's attention to important contexts in Jane Austen and the Reformation, in which he places Austen's works in conversation with the nostalgia literature that responded to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century. He convincingly argues for the legacy of the Dissolution and its influence on Austen's depiction of religious landscape in her works. Moore focuses on Austen's personal familiarity "with the remnants of the medieval sacred landscape" (3), and he develops intersecting claims that "the Dissolution . . . inflicted a wound on the mental and physical landscapes of England" and that Austen's "novels participate in the nostalgic tradition" resulting from it (5). In some places, this argument might have been made stronger with more sustained close readings of the texts he dwells on (which include the History of England, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sanditon). Moore's goal is "to historicize Austen's religion" and to show "that she was an active participant in a divisive national conversation about religious change in England" (5). His book does account for many of the contexts that gave rise to nostalgia for monastic ruins, but to decide how Austen uses such references in her novels and other writings requires a closer and more careful analysis than is often present in this admirable study. There is no way to tell if, "far from being a woman who would find the modern world congenial, Austen was suspicious of the changes that made it possible" (7), and to suggest it was the Reformation alone that made the modern world "possible" is to simplify an argument that would require a whole other book (or books) to fully explicate.

Despite this oversimplification, Moore's survey of nostalgic accounts of monasteries and abbeys, including attention to antiquarian works such as Dugdale's Monasticon, provides important historical and literary context for Austen's novels. In chapters 1–3 of his book, Moore's discussion of nostalgia literature and historical context make a convincing argument for why these events and ideologies matter for Austen criticism. The second half of the book focuses on a selection of three novels. Moore's most convincing discussion covers how, in Northanger Abbey, General Tilney's renovation of the abbey is an implicit criticism of the transformation of such abbeys from religious spaces to secular domestic spaces. His conclusion that "like a novice entering a convent, Catherine must learn the 'rule' of the house concerning time, but this rule lacks any spiritual component" (90) is compelling, as is his argument that "the General's ejection of Catherine may even constitute an oblique reference to the Dissolution itself" (94). Both of these statements construct Catherine as a nun, but Moore does not investigate this question further with close reading or an analysis of Catherine's character; the implications for gender identity and where this configuration might fit into a parody of the gothic are unexplored in favour of a focus on how Austen "may" be pointing to the Dissolution.

An underdeveloped context in Moore's work is that of the broader rela tionship between gothic literature and the nostalgia for Catholic institutions. Though he admits in his coda that he does not mean to "imply that [Austen] is singular or eccentric in harboring nostalgic attitudes" (146), he also uncritically simplifies representations of convents in works by gothic novelists, claiming that "novels by Ann Radcliffe and Mathew Lewis" depict "the corrosive effects of claustral confinement. In these works, evil abbots and abbesses do their best to crush the spirits of those under their care, and monks and nuns are often driven mad or die in desperate attempts to flee monastic tyranny" (49). This is true in part, but Radcliffe also depicts nunneries as sacred spaces, and many scholars have written about her portrayal of sanctuary in the context of the French Revolution. An acknowledgement of this criticism...