This essay takes as a case study a group of reworkings of Austen that are cross-cultural in a particular, and somewhat unusual, sense. The target audience for these two advice books and six novels has certain similarities to the one Austen herself had in view: these anticipated readers are English-speaking Christian women partial to love plots. Unlike the predominantly Anglican readers of fiction in early nineteenth-century England, however, the readers addressed by my two writers, Sarah Arthur and Debra White Smith, are evangelical Protestant women in today’s United States who enjoy romance novels and romantic films. Sarah Arthur’s Dating Mr. Darcy: A Smart Girl’s Guide to Sensible Romance (2005), published by Tyndale, a Christian press, coaches young evangelical readers through reflections on themselves and their potential marriage partners, using Pride and Prejudice as a touchstone. [...] Debra White Smith’s “Austen Series,” published from 2004 to 2006 by the Christian press Harvest House, recasts each of Austen’s novels as a present-day romance starring characters of faith. Smith’s use of Austen culminates in her nonfiction advice book What Jane Austen Taught Me about Love and Romance (2007), in which she relates the moral dilemmas of Austen’s characters to those faced by contemporary evangelicals, including herself.
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Smith makes it quite clear, as is hardly surprising given her anticipated audience, that her heroines and heroes are people of faith, and that this identity is important to each of them personally and especially in the search for a mate. Yet here too she adds less to Austen’s characterizations, and does so more subtly, than one might expect. Apart from her Fanny Price character, who bears an appropriately high concern for her own morality and that of the clergy, and her Catherine Morland character, portrayed as a religious seeker, Smith’s heroines could all be described in the terms with which Dave Davidson (Darcy) thinks of Eddi Boswick (Elizabeth): “reverent, [but] not the most demonstrative church member” (First Impressions 269). Smith’s most crucial intervention is to incorporate explicitly a dimension of religious conversion into the transformative changes of heart experienced by certain of Austen’s heroines. Anna Woods (Marianne) turns back to Bryan Brixby (Col. Brandon) after an extended, near-death vision of the “the Giver of Life” (Reason and Romance 293). Amanda Priebe (Emma Woodhouse) repents of her matchmaking in a prayer in which she apologizes for “trying to play God” (Amanda 298). Eddi Boswick, too, asks God to “forgive” her once she realizes how she has misjudged Dave Davidson (First Impressions 248).
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