Henry Thomas Austen In 1793 he joined the Oxfordshire Militia, rising to captain before resigning in 1801. In 1804 he founded, with two associates, the bank of Austen, Maude and Tilson in Covent Garden, London. It went bankrupt in 1816. He entered the church that same year and was made curate of Chawton, Hampshire. In 1820 he was made Rector of Steventon. He arranged the publication of "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" after Jane Austen's death in 1817. He is believed to have published the first biographical notice of her, which prefaces those novels. He revised and expanded that short memoir for the republication
Styles and themes of Jane Austen "Mansfield Park" and "Persuasion" are the novels most often cited as examples of Austen's growing religiosity. For example, "Persuasion" "is subtly different from the laxer, more permissive social atmosphere of the three novels Jane Austen began before 1800." and contains more frequent references to Providence. In "Mansfield Park", Fanny stands for spirituality and proper morality. It is she who most clearly characterizes Henry Crawford's affair with Maria in religious terms, in the language of sin, guilt and punishment. She is portrayed as an earnest, strict and struggling Christian, not perfect but trying hard. Since the rise of feminist literary criticism