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The Virtue of Chastity: Lessons on Love from Jane Austen and Dorothy Sayers

I want here to discuss Jane Austen and Dorothy Sayers - and, in particular, Mansfield Park and Clouds of Witness - not as a literary critic, but as a moral philosopher.

Examining fiction is part of a trend in moral philosophy, especially in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. In his book After Virtue , MacIntyre contrasted the subjectivist ethics of most modern philosophy with the older tradition of the virtues found in Aristotle, Aquinas and their heirs. He sought to re-establish the older tradition of the moral philosophy of the virtues.

One of the key parts of MacIntyre's project is the narrative concept of the self as opposed to, for example, the empiricists' "bundle" concept of self - that is, I am a bundle of my sense impressions.

The consequences of this concept of personal identity for ethics is shown in a story about Bertrand Russell, a philosophical descendent of British empiricism. He was cycling across Grantchester meadow, and realised that he was no longer the same person he was ten years ago. The Russell of ten years ago had married; but the present day Russell, he reasoned, could not be bound by those promises since he was now a different person.

The narrative concept of the self would insist that the Russell cycling across the meadow was the same person as the Russell who married ten years ago: personal identity is a story of an individual life through time and space, interlocked with the narratives of other individuals. Hence, this Russell is bound by his promise.

Further, when deciding whether or not to honour a promise, it is not enough to consider only the effect of that particular action, as most modern moral philosophy does. The person deciding whether or not to break a promise must also consider that his decision will affect his own character. If I fail to keep a promise today, I am more likely to fail to keep a promise tomorrow. I do not come to each moral dilemma without a history. If I have decided to break a promise in the past, I will be more likely to break another promise in the future.

This aspect of the narrative conception of self, that our specific decisions influence the sort of persons we become, means that novelists have much to teach moral philosophy. MacIntyre discusses the novels of Jane Austen because: "It is her uniting of Christian and Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Austen the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues which I have tried to identify."

We who are familiar with Dorothy Sayers must forgive him for the gap in his reading, and thus, his failure to recognise Sayers's contributions to that same tradition.

MacIntyre sees that Austen's novels are preoccupied with counterfeits of the virtues - respectability and amiability rather than true chastity and charity. For Austen, morality is not just inhibition and regulation of the passions; priority is given to self-knowledge as intellectual and moral virtue. In addition, in her celebration of the virtue of constancy she demonstrates her understanding of the threat of the modern world to the integrity of the personality. She would not think that "reinventing" oneself was necessarily or even probably a good thing. Constancy is more than patience or resignation; it is the act that preserves the self in an environment that can fragment it.

I want to extend MacIntyre's reading of Austen in two ways: first, to Dorothy Sayers as a novelist in the same tradition of Anglican Christianity and the virtues as Jane Austen; secondly, by drawing out the meaning of the virtue of chastity in Austen's and Sayers's work.

Love and marriage

Chastity, a word that is much misunderstood in our day, is the virtue that preserves the self in order to love. Sayers and Austen both contrasted chastity with its counterfeit - respectability. What is respectable differs from one age to another and from one culture to another. For Austen and Sayers, as Christian moralists, the virtues - the habits of pursuing the true good of a human life - will remain constant despite the changes in social mores. Respectability values female chastity because of property, a connection of ideas which became stronger from Austen's time to Sayers's day. The very word "immoral" became synonymous with unchaste. As Sayers wrote in "The Other Six Deadly Sins":

A man may be greedy and selfish; spiteful, cruel, jealous, and unjust; violent and brutal; grasping, unscrupulous, and a liar; stubborn and arrogant; stupid, morose, and dead to every noble instinct - and still we are ready to say of him that he is not an immoral man."

Sayers and Austen had a fuller conception of the virtue of chastity, that it was part of personal integrity and the foundation for true charity. Neither author would have counted the world well lost for love, but both recognised that love, unregulated by virtue, could lead to tragedy. Both wrote about women as full human beings, with marriage as potentially a constitutive part of a life of virtue for both partners. Equally, marriage could hinder the pursuit of virtue of one or both of the spouses.

The changes in the economy of Britain between Austen's time and Sayers's time influenced the changes in respectable behaviour.

Austen lived in an agricultural society; marriage was about survival as well as property. Children were necessary for their contributions to the family's survival, not least in caring for the elderly family members. Adultery threatened both the moral and the economic order. Sayers, on the other hand, wrote Clouds of Witness in an industrial society in which children and their labour were no longer as necessary for family survival. Contraception was gaining acceptance; the statistical tables document the fall in the number of children per family throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, in Sayers's time, marriage was still the goal towards which most women were directed; it was almost as economically necessary as it was in Austen's day. Adultery, real or contrived, was a way to end an unsatisfactory marriage.

Both writers are read by women today for whom marriage is one option among many, not necessary for survival in a world where bearing children is a choice and maternal mortality is a rare event. Comparing their novels, we can mark the changes in what is considered respectable and what Sayers and Austen thought true virtue.

MacIntyre wrote, "It has proved easy for later generations not to understand [Austen's] importance as a moralist because she is after all a novelist." If it is hard to see Austen as a moralist because she is a novelist, it is harder still to see Sayers as a moralist for she wrote, not the fiction of high culture, but detective stories. However, detective stories embody a theory of justice, mark off good and evil, and show just how grey are the areas between. Sayers's novels explore character and, like Austen, she contrasts the counterfeits of respectability with the true virtues - especially in Clouds of Witness. This book, about the uses men and women make of each other, was written at the time when Sayers was coping with her own messy and unsatisfactory relationship with Cournos and having Bill White's illegitimate son.

But first, I want to consider Mansfield Park through its characters and then will turn to Clouds of Witness, and compare Sayers's moral vision to that of Austen. Finally, I will turn to the relevance of their writing today, with particular reference to Jane Austen's Guide to Dating .

Mansfield Park: The fulfilment of virtuous love

Mansfield Park was, Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra, about ordination. Throughout, Austen contrasts the conventional understanding of marriage as an economic relationship with marriage as the fulfilment of virtuous love. The heroine of the book, Fanny Price, is an indigent niece being raised in Sir Thomas Bertram's house, Mansfield Park. The novel's action focuses on the relationships between the Mansfield Park young people: Tom, Edmund, Maria, Julia Bertram and Fanny Price and London visitors to the Mansfield rectory, Henry and Mary Crawford, when all are of marriageable age.

Fanny is courted by Henry Crawford, whom readers of the novel know enjoys making girls fall in love with him. His flirtation results in his falling in love with Fanny, and offering her marriage. She refuses him in the face of strong pressure from everyone at Mansfield. Fanny is sent away from Mansfield Park to her home in Portsmouth; Sir Thomas planned this visit as

"a medicinal project upon his niece's understanding, which he must consider as at present diseased ... Her father's house would, in all probability, teach her the value of a good income; and he trusted that she would be a wiser and happier woman all her life, for the experiment he had devised."

While Fanny is in Portsmouth, Henry has an affair with Maria, now married, and runs away with her. Mary Crawford's attitude to this episode, regret for the imprudence which led to discovery but not for the adultery, finally divides her from Edmund, and the novel closes with Fanny married to Edmund.

Placing the three main women on a spectrum of virtue, Fanny embodies the virtuous woman, Maria the unchaste and unjust woman (for adultery is a sin against justice as well as against chastity), and Mary Crawford occupies the middle ground. Fanny fails, C.S. Lewis writes, not because she is a prig (others disagree) nor because she is self-righteous, but because she is insipid: "One of the most dangerous of literary venture is the little, shy unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is your readers may agree with your characters." Fanny has firm principles, but it is her love for Edmund which protected her heart from Henry Crawford. She has the self-awareness that is the mark of virtue for Austen.

Maria is almost a caricature: she is proud, passionate and competitive; she is careless of others' feelings and obsessed with appearances rather than reality. She was impatient to marry: "In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry." We cannot like her enough to care about her fall and her banishment to a cottage with the evil Mrs Norris.

Mary Crawford has wit and vivacity - like Elizabeth Bennet, but with more worldly knowledge and cynicism about love and marriage. Mary has a jaundiced view of marriage, having seen her aunt made unhappy by the Admiral's infidelities, her sister Mrs Grant at the mercy of Dr Grant's digestion, and her friends unhappy in marriages which had every worldly advantage: "I look upon the Frasers to be about as unhappy as most other married people. And yet it was a most desirable match for Janet at the time ... She could not do otherwise than accept him, for he was rich, and she had nothing; but he turns out ill tempered and exigeant." Mary Crawford's fault is not a fault of temper, according to Edmund: "She would not voluntarily give unnecessary pain to any one ... Her faults are of principle ... of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind."

Austen makes her moral positions clear when she concludes the book: Mary Crawford has learned enough of a higher standard of judging love and marriage to find no suitable partner in her London life. Henry Crawford and Sir Thomas Bertram come to a new self-knowledge. About Henry Crawford she writes:

"He was entangled by his own vanity, with as little excuse of love as possible, and without the smallest inconstancy of mind towards her cousin ... he went off with [Maria] at last, because he could not help it, regretting Fanny even at the moment, but regretting her infinitely more when all the bustles of the intrigue was over, and a very few months had taught him, by the force of contrast, to place a yet higher value on the sweetness of her temper, the purity of her mind, and the excellence of her principles ... he had lost the woman whom he had rationally as well as passionately loved."

Sir Thomas is aware of his own errors in the education of his daughters: "He feared that principle, active principle had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice." Fanny and Edmund's match was greeted by Sir Thomas with pleasure, for he was, "Sick of ambitious and mercenary connexions, [and] priz[ed] more and more the sterling good of principle and temper." Sir Thomas perceives that Fanny benefited from "early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure."

Here Austen is relating virtue to the truth of human life in a fallen world. The virtues are necessary throughout life, for everyone, rich or poor.

Clouds of Witness: Respectability or virtue?

Dorothy Sayers's detective fiction envisioned a moral universe that assumed that justice should be done and people should be held responsible for their acts. These were narratives of the virtues in an individual life lived in relation to a community. The plot of Clouds of Witness revolves around the charge that the Duke of Denver has murdered Denis Cathcart, his sister's fiance. Although Sayers naturally focused on Lord Peter and his process of investigation, she gives us a setting and accounting of the Duke and of Lady Mary Wimsey which contrast virtue and respectability.

The Duke of Denver has returned to the shooting lodge at Riddlesdale in October to continue a relationship with a local farmer's wife begun in August, when he was at the Lodge for the beginning of the shooting season. His sister, Lady Mary, is acting as hostess in the absence of the Duchess. She has preparing to contract a marriage of convenience with Denis Cathcart, who, we discover, is marrying her for her money in order to continue supporting his mistress.

Mary is in as restricted a situation as the Austen heroines, though her daily life is materially easier. She is aimless, planning a marriage of convenience because she has no use for herself or outlet for her talents. When she cannot go through with her marriage, she cannot summon the moral courage to tell Cathcart directly:

"I was getting more frightened of Denis every day ... I knew there'd be an awful row with Gerald. And really I was rather ashamed - the engagement had been announced and ther'd be a ghastly lot of talk and people trying to persuade me. And Denis might have made things horribly uncomfortable for Gerald - he was rather that sort. So we decided the best thing to do would be just to run away and get married first and escape the wrangling."

Her deception about the elopement has landed her brother in jail, and she retires to her room with nervous prostration. The Dowager Duchess makes clear just how badly she thinks Mary is behaving: lying, self-dramatising, being thoughtless and self-centred. She accounts for Mary's silliness in terms of work:

"If Mary had listened to me, and done something useful instead of that V.A.D. work, which never came to much ... there were very much more sensible things which Mary might have done really well, only that she was so crazy to get to London."

Mary's relationship with Goyles had distorted her ability to balance the claims of loyalty to her suitor, and her duty to tell the truth. Peter confronts her: "Mary have you thought what you are doing? You are perjuring yourself and putting Gerald in peril of his life, in order to shield from justice a man whom you suspect of murdering your lover and who has most certainly tried to murder me." Appealed to tell the truth, she does. Goyles, her erstwhile suitor, shows up as a pretentious hypocrite. Peter confronted him:

"you left the girl you were going to marry to make for herself the unpleasant discovery that there was a dead man in the garden and that her gallant wooer had made tracks. What did you expect her to think?"

"Well, I thought she'd keep quiet for her own sake. As a matter of fact, I didn't think very clearly about anything."

Murbles describes his action correctly: "you lost your head, young man, and ran away in a very foolish and cowardly manner." Mary breaks with Goyles because, "I didn't mind thinking you were a murderer but I do mind your being such an ass." From this point Mary, recovers her self and is able to bear the fierce cross-examination at the trial.

Cathcart, her fiance, is a tragic figure: he loves a woman he cannot trust, who is his only as long as he can pay for her. He loses his honour cheating at cards, and then prepares to marry a rich wife in order to support his mistress. He has maintained the outward standards of respectability, but his life and identity are hollow. When Simone leaves his protection, he despairs. Sir Impey says, "From their earliest acquaintance she had lied to him, and he knew it, and that knowledge was yet powerless to loosen the bands of his fatal fascination." Love without virtue in the lover and beloved is a powerful force of destruction.

The Duke's adultery creates much of the suspense of the novel. It may be that most readers immediately assume that he was out in the middle of the night following amorous pursuits, when the transcript of the inquest describes him as going for a walk on the moors from midnight until 3 am. I certainly didn't, the first time I read the book, but now think that Sayers left enough hints for that to be what she expected her readers to think, or perhaps, entertain as a possibility. Mrs Pettigrew-Robinson regrets coming to Riddlesdale when the Duchess isn't there. Parker enquires whether the letter from Freeborn had a reference to "an old - er - entanglement which your brother wouldn't wish the Duchess to know about?" Lord Peter replies, "There were occasions - mild ones, but Helen would make the most of them." When Sir Impey Biggs arrives at Riddlesdale, the Duchess says:

"If only I'd been at Riddlesdale none of this would have happened. Of course we all know that he wasn't doing any harm, but we can't expect he jurymen to understand that. The lower orders are so prejudiced. It is absurd of Gerald not to speak out. He has no consideration."

Denver's protection of Mrs Grimethorpe is part of the same chivalry as Mary's protection of Goyles. It is an example of the respectability versus virtue contrast, as is the Duke's reaction to the accusation that Cathcart cheated at cards - that is sufficient to end the engagement, but Cathcart's earlier semi-blackmailing of the Duke in the club, which we presume was about Mrs Grimethope, was not. The Duke is portrayed as not thinking deeply, just following the social patterns of his set.

Mrs Grimethorpe has self-knowledge and understanding of virtue which she reveals when she arrives in London:

"I couldn't keep silence. It's better my man should kill me, for I'm unhappy enough, and maybe I couldn't be any worse off in the Lord's hand - rather than they should hang him for a thing he never done. He was kind and I was desperate miserable, that's the truth, and I'm hoping his lady won't be hard on him when she knows it all."

Here is moral courage. The consequences of her action are much more serious than those Lady Mary feared, yet Mrs Grimethorpe accepts them. Mrs Grimethorpe has been freed, by her act of courage, and legally freed by Grimethorpe's death. Sayers describes her thus: "She walked before him into the shop - her own woman at last." She possesses herself because she recognised her duty to the community and performed it regardless of potential personal cost.

Guides to love

Both Dorothy Sayers and Jane Austen lived in ages with a profound double standard. In Austen's day, the social penalties and the moral disapproval of adultery, at least for women, were swift and certain. Men suffered less, as Austen noted regarding Henry Crawford: "That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace, should in a just measure attend his share of the offence is, we know, not one of the barriers which society gives to virtue. In this world the penalty is less equal than could be wished." Her writing makes clear that it is the moral failure which is to be condemned, whatever society may say.

In Sayers's day, the social consequences of adultery were still harsh, especially for the woman, but not as harsh as in Austen's time. Her portrayals of Mrs Grimethorpe and the Duke show us that being virtuous does not mean being perfect. Mrs Grimethorpe is fully aware that she has done wrong, and that there will be consequences. The Duke appears to be a transgressor of norms who has not realised the consequences of adultery to his character. The Duke escapes social censure, even private censure from his wife; but he is morally undeveloped compared to Mrs Grimethorpe.

How might modern readers see the message of the virtues in these texts? In Jane Austen's Guide to Dating , Lauren Henderson tries to find her way through what she calls "the minefield of modern dating." Henderson is writing in New York, where the dating scene has become a nightmare of power-plays and "rules." The sexual revolution has resulted in men and women no longer having any idea of how to relate to each other happily. She writes about dating, and not about love or marriage, because there is no longer a necessary connection between marriage and sex, or even love and sex.

Henderson distils ten rules for dating from Austen's fiction. She marks the differences between the twenty-first century and Jane Austen's time in this way: "women can now take for granted freedoms that in [Austen's] time would have banished even the mention of our names form polite society. However ... we've forgotten... the seriousness with which she took compatibility and mutuality." She writes that Austen can teach modern women to be honest with themselves, to nurture a sense of self-worth, and to confront bad behaviour in themselves and in their lovers. Here are her ten rules:

  1. If you like someone, make it clear that you do.
  2. Don't put your feelings on public display, unless they are fully reciprocated.
  3. Don't play games or lead people on.
  4. Have faith in your own instincts.
  5. Don't fall for superficial qualities.
  6. Look for someone who can bring out your best qualities.
  7. Don't settle - Don't marry for money, or convenience, or out of loneliness.
  8. Be witty if you can, but not cynical, indiscreet, or cruel.
  9. Be prepared to wait for the right person to come along.
  10. If your lover needs a reprimand, let him have it.

Much of this advice seems like common sense. If you look at the list of rules, you see that they depend on the virtues Jane Austen's novels display: honesty, self-respect, promise-keeping, constancy, charity, self-possession, but not egotism. Rule 5 means looking at a potential lover's character - all of their behaviour, and not just at the external goods of appearance, wealth, or power. This also applies to her readers - women who are trying to fit some ideal mould of appearance. She warns us to be particularly wary of someone who is rude to waiters and other "social inferiors." This is a sign of a lack of respect for others that will eventually corrupt the relationship.

Rule 6 is glossed as, "You should like who you are when you're with the person you love." This maxim assumes that each person has a concept of right and wrong, and has learned that relationships can foster or hinder character development. Consider the woman who calls into a radio advice show and begins, "I know he has a problem with alcohol and drugs and sometimes hits me and the children, but ..." Why is there a "but"? Why are relationships like this confused with love?

I do not believe that we could create a similar "Dorothy L. Sayers's Guide to Dating." She was unhappy with her social skills in that arena, as she wrote in "Eros in Academe." She rejected the social rules of her day that didn't allow women to be human, but saw them as always and totally focused on being sexually attractive. However, we could write a "Dorothy L. Sayers's Guide to Friendship" and, I believe we can write a "Dorothy L. Sayers's Guide to Love" suitable for the twenty-first century.

To make a start, I looked at the letters she wrote to Cournos at the time she was writing Clouds of Witness, and one later letter to Charles Williams:

  1. Love must be honest: "Well, well - the prizes all go to the women who 'play their cards well' - but if they can only be won that way, I would rather lose the game." She considered telling Cournos she accepted his terms for sex and cheating him into giving her children. She didn't because "it wouldn't be fair to burden you, especially as at that time I was practically penniless."
  2. Love must be personal: "Be a brute if you like, but be personal and you'll be irresistible."
  3. Love is between equals: "So Uncle Pandarus - you can send Troilus along when you like ... a companion ... more necessary really than a lover ... a lover, cuts one off from one's friends - 'one can't be ecstatic about something that seems to involve telling lies to one's charwoman' Troilus should be decent and kind, and companionable, and take an interest in things, but not be superior, or make one feel it's a crime to be rather a dab at doing cross-words and taking photographs."
  4. Love must be faithful: "Absolute and utter faithfulness to the claims of lover or husband is a kind of fanaticism with me."
  5. Love must be fun: "I'm disgustingly robust and happy go lucky about the actual process. And coarse and greedy like the women in the comic mediaeval stories." Moreover, that "true bedworthiness" in the male depends on three assumptions:
  • That the primary aim and object of bed is that a good time should be had by all.
  • That (other things being equal) it is the business of the male to make it so.
  • That he knows his business.

These rules seem to me to be embodied in Sayers's fiction, especially in the relationship between Peter and Harriet, John Munting and Elizabeth Drake, Lady Mary and Parker. Much of her attitude was formed by her study of the mediaeval literature of courtly love. They show us her foundational belief that women and men are human first, as well as her long held belief that the mediaevals were right - it is the men who like the fuss and "tormented philosophy of love."

If we look at Sayers's life, we find that she lived her rules; she did remain faithful to Mac, honouring the commitment she made, however unpleasant he made their life together. Comparing her decision to that of Bertrand Russell, we can see that at least part of it derived from a differing conception of the moral life, and a radically different concept of personal identity. Sayers was not trying to impose rules on anyone; she was happiest, and felt she did the best work, when she showed, in the action of a novel or play, her core beliefs.


In my reading, the fiction of Dorothy Sayers and Jane Austen exhibit a shared commitment to the virtues. They reject the autonomous individual of modernity who has no history, like Russell, and who defines freedom as freedom from restraint. Sayers and Austen, like all virtue ethicists, define freedom as freedom for pursuing the good. This is a crucial, life-giving distinction.

Austen and Sayers understand life through the Christian faith: it is a fallen world in which we must struggle to do good. They are neither prudes nor puritans who want to repress sexuality. But, for them, marriage is not just about sex, survival, children or property. Love, sex and marriage are about compatibility and mutuality. Failing will be part of life, but the good person repents and amends their life. Each person's life is a story which will have the ending that they have created for themselves through their choices. Both offer readers of today a vision of a life worth leading.

Christine Fletcher is Associate Professor of Theology at Benedictine University, and the author of The Artist and the Trinity: Dorothy L. Sayers' Theology of Work.